Chris

Somehow, Idle Thumbs won CastMedium's Best Podcast 2010 award: http://www.castmedium.com/2010/12/25/podcast-awards-2010-details/ Also, we're up for the reader award, which we probably won't win because Giant Bomb is way ahead. But go ahead and vote anyway! It's in the column on the right.

chrisremo

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is pretty remarkable. You should read it.

Yeah, it is. It's a really great game. It's not as balanced all around as Civ IV, but I assume it will get there with an expansion or two, just like Civ IV did.

I don't have a problem with this. Featured games are heavily reduced in price--you don't have to treat it as anything other than just yet another Steam sale. Even if you have no interest in participating, the games are still discounted. If you don't want them, don't buy them. If anything, this is encouraging people to actually play the games they get in their Steam sale, rather than just letting them pile up in their library like everybody seems to say they always do. As a side note, I've had roughly half of the daily goals as they went up, just by way of stuff I'd already done in games. In one case I actually bought a game that was featured, simply because it was featured. There's a goal that's simply to play the demo or full game of Undergarden--as far as I've noticed, it's the only one that works that way, which makes sense because it's clearly the least-known game in the hunt so far. I just went ahead and bought it in good faith after seeing that others on my friends list had also done so (which is saying something, since you only need to play the free demo for the goal). It's not a mindblowing game but it's nice and relaxing, the kind of small project I like supporting, and I probably never would have even known it existed if not for this wacky promotion. If it were just part of yet another standard Steam sale, it would have sailed right under my radar. Edit: Looks like I have 16/20 so far. I may try for a few I don't have, like the Mafia II and Fallout New Vegas ones, since I feel like I should have actually played those games anyway.

It's a podblast five years in the making! "Countdown to Tears" Five years ago, prophecies by Steven Spielberg and EALA's Neil Young charted a course of new, untold emotional resonance, and the future of video games was irrevocably changed. As Game Developers Conference 2009 approaches, the clock ticks ever closer to the video game singularity: Prepare for the countdown to tears. Games discussed: Steven Spielberg, Neil Young, the crying game

I loved the version I played as an IGF judge. I'll definitely pick it up when it hits PC. Also the game isn't just by Edmund McMillen. It's also by Tommy Refenes, an incredibly smart and funny guy who I've worked with in the past and deserves credit as the other full half of Team Meat.

If it says "Too" that means you have to type the word "too."

That's too bad. I played all the way through Alpha Protocol and had no big technical issues that I can remember. I have an ATI card, so maybe that's why?

I love zug zug. It's actually part of the WarCraft universe. You don't have to draw meaningless lines to real-world celebrities to get it. It's just a funny goofy property of Orcs in the WarCraft world.

I agree. I'm not hugely bothered or anything, and my opinion probably doesn't count for much compared to people who have spent a lot more time in the Thumbs Minecraft world anyway. But the stuff that really impresses me in Minecraft are the crazy creations and surprising things that exist in their own logic. Simply referencing other video games kind of breaks the surreal self-defining character of the Idle Thumbs server, at least to me.

That's not the same at all. The only way to avoid some reference is to know it's there and not talk to that character or whatever--and the only way to know it's there is to actually experience it the first time. Once you talk to some NPC and they say something to the effect of "LOLL look how my name is actually kind of like the name of a singer you've probably heard of!!1" you've already experienced the lame "joke." There's no way for you to avoid having had that experience. Everything in WoW is part of WoW. As big and diverse as it is, it's a single world with shared themes and art direction and tone. Blizzard has just gotten increasingly lax about maintaining consistency--or it's a deliberate stylistic choice. Either way, it's the same result. As far as I'm concerned, it's a negative aspect of the game, not something that's purely inevitable. I did an interview with Obsidian's Feargus Urquhart about Fallout New Vegas, and one of the answers he gave about Fallout 2 really sums up what I mean: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/5943/taking_back_fallout.php?page=2 He talks about how Fallout 2 went really overboard with the pop culture references and tongue-in-cheek humor. That's not because of any inevitability. He acknowledges he didn't properly oversee all the different writers and designers to ensure that wasn't going on. Each of the individual designers thought they were being clever and unique by slipping some of that stuff in there--and maybe they would have been if they weren't ALL doing it. The fact that so many of them were resulted in a game whose tone was out of whack. (Some people prefer the tone of Fallout 2, which is a separate issue; either way, it changed from Fallout 1.) I suspect something similar happened over time with the WarCraft universe. The difference is, WoW has been under constant development for so long that I imagine at this point it's just become a deliberate and acknowledged part of the world's character. My other longstanding suspicion is that, due to the massive size of the game's development team, Blizzard has hired a lot of quest and NPC writers who have little to no game development or writing experience (particularly based on how the job descriptions read), who think that being clever and funny is the same thing as referencing the existence of a person or trend of whose existence the player is likely aware.

It just makes the world stupid and goofy to me. I don't really have any great desire for the game to be as HOLY SHIT EPIC as the CG cutscenes are, because that's goofy in its own way, but the disconnect between what Blizzard tells you the game is about, and what the game is actually about, is just crazy. Getting me to play WoW is already a bit of an uphill battle, because of the repetitive nature of the questing and leveling and all sorts of other issues, but there are times every once in a while when I think "Maybe I'll give this a shot again," and those are the times the stupid "pop culture references" dissuade me. So it's not that that aspect does it on its own, it's that they're sort of the straw that breaks the camel's back of my tolerance for MMO gameplay and world conventions.

This is one of the reasons I keep not going back to WoW.

They're obviously created with the purpose of servicing the publicity needs of a big company, but that's absolutely not mutually exclusive to containing good content. Similarly, there's a team of people at every publisher deciding what games to greenlight based on what fits into a corporate strategy, and then shaping the game's publicity based on that, but that doesn't mean the games are inherently bad.

He may mean the Giant Death Robot

Unless the translator is for some reason particularly poor, I disagree. I don't doubt that there are subtleties I might be missing, but based on the non-subtle aspects, I'd be surprised if there were lots of missing depth beyond little cultural references and things like that. I've read four books by Umberto Eco in the last year, translated from Italian, and they're some of the most mindblowing experiences I've ever had with fiction. I've also read a few books by Haruki Murakami, translated from Japanese, and his style is extraordinarily distinctive. Larsson has that very common style of writing his books as if they were screenplays. You can practically see the camera push up into the character's face as they let loose the zinger and then the scene cuts sharply. It's just a very, very conventional style. He also relies on a few particular character tricks--pretty much every single character in the books is either Good or Bad. The Good characters might do unsavory things, but they are always presented entirely sympathentically. Meanwhile, the Bad characters are constantly, without fail, ruefully referring to any woman they ever encounter as "bitch" or "whore" or "slut" or whatever. It gets to the point where you can pretty much identify every single aspect of a character as soon as he's engaged in one of a few key template actions. Again I don't mean to imply these were bad books or I didn't enjoy them. They just obviously weren't written by any particular master of fiction. They were his first (and only) books, so who knows where he could have gone if he were alive. That said, his first books were a crime thriller trilogy. That seems to set a precedent for a career.

I recently finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third of Stieg Larsson's three crime thrillers. I enjoyed them; the plotting was really sharp and compelling. The prose was nothing to write home about, though; it's just straight up popular fiction. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but considering how much time I spend with really average or sub-average fiction in video games, generally I like the books I read to be more interesting from a literary standpoint. I'm now in the middle of No Country for Old Men, which Steve loaned me months ago but I hadn't gotten around to reading, and the level of artistry and craftsmanship is just sky-high by comparison. I'd only read one other Cormac McCarthy book prior to this. I did like that one quite a bit, but I'm enjoying this one WAY more and it makes me want to seek out more by him.

I basically agree. Yeah, some dubious PR decisions were made. It's dumb, boo, arrghh. However, GOG still offers a ton of games in the same price range they always have, with the same benefits those games have always had, and they're still adding more. It seems completely pointless to hold a grudge.

It's also 33% cheaper.

Gold is also far more useful and pivotal in this game than in previous Civs. I find it to be something of a bottleneck during rapid expansion, combined with happiness. I kind of like it though, it means you have to consider new cities pretty carefully. And yeah especially in this stackless world, the instant heal is huge. I find myself using it all the time, especially before you start getting the more interesting upgrades like +20% ranged defense. It's also really useful quite early on when you're taking on barbarians. In the early game, not having to sit around for five turns while you heal up between barbarian attacks makes a huge difference.

Not the same thing. All those other games you mention DO have discernible features. The Oblivion one has a big symbol in the middle, and the box is "textured" to look like canvas or something, plus there are logos and badges all over it. The World of Warcraft ones all have huge stylized game logos in the middle and are also made to look like specific materials evoking the theme of the game or expansion (for example, Cataclysm looks like lava flowing under stone). BioShock's is meant to look like a steel embossed underwater plaque or something, and again, like these others, it has a huge stylized logo in the middle of it. There are a few key differences between those and Ultima VII. Ultima VII's box has a very understated logo treatment. The "Ultima VII" part is just the "Ultima font," and, more awesomely, "The Black Gate" is presented in nothing more ornate than a simple elegant sans-serif typeface. The text is even presented in a dark, muted color over a dark background, keeping it from popping out too much and distracting from the overall effect. The box also isn't made to look like some kind of texture or material. It's just flat black, and that's it. It's not supposed to look like "black something," it's an absence of material. There's also only a single studio logo, small and centered at the bottom, and it's not full of obnoxious graphics. There's probably no way around this these days, which is garbage. Blizzard's CEs come the closest but they still are mandated to have that dumb ESRB thing. Oblivion's is the worst, it's full of all kind of "BEST OF SHOW!!" nonsense, and with ANY console game you'll never get rid of the huge branding stripe. Like I was saying, you can't do it properly now. It just isn't physically possible if you want to go through any remotely legitimate distribution channel. Ultima VII was actually on store shelves. It could never be on store shelves in that form today. The most important difference, though, is in the composition. In every single other one of those box covers, the big ornate game logo treatment is right in the middle of the box; it's the centerpiece. Every single one of those other game covers can be described as "Whoa, awesome-looking symbol thing!" The designer of the Ultima VII box left the actual center of the image completely blank. The main subject of the box is the absence of an image.

Welcome!

I was already there to meet with the Giant Bomb guys (since I know them) and help show them the game and stuff. When the interview started I didn't have a mic on me so I didn't want to jump in and say stuff that wouldn't be sufficiently audible. Plus, it amused me to just sit there for 45 minutes. Also I didn't know they were going to release the entire interview; I figured they would edit it down. Also, I don't know if Giant Bomb mentioned this or not--it may not have occurred to them--but we showed them the same sequence that's in the released gameplay video, and one of us was sitting there playing through it. It's not prerendered in any way, it's entirely in-game. It's just a FRAPS video of the game. Obviously, as Jake and others have correctly speculated, it's higher density than the entire game is likely to be, and it definitely represents sort of a "perfect" playthrough of these encounters, in terms of providing an entertaining end result, but it's definitely all real-time playable.

I got brutally gangbanged pretty early on, and despite forming a few alliances there wasn't really anything I could do about it, so eventually I just stopped checking back in.