RubixsQube

Nick, if you want to farm vials, it is not as annoying or intense as you think it is. Wake up at the Central Yharnam lamp, right near where you got the flamesprayer. (1) Head left and down some stairs. There's an easy dude there. Kill him, he usually drops a vial or two. Head down more stairs and there's a door in front of you. Kill the dude in there, he might drop some. Kill the old wheelchair man, he always drops 5 quicksilver bullets. You have spent maybe 1 minute doing this. Head outside the house (not the way you came) and through a hallway, turn left and kill the two trolls (2). Practice parrying if you want. These guys almost always drop vials. Head back to the house, and go upstairs, killing two dudes upstairs. More vial possibilities. Outside and up the stairs there is another easy dude, two werewolves (again, good chances for vials), (3) and in the other direction (towards where you fought the cleric beast) a troll and some ravens. The troll will also drop some vials, usually. And past the troll there's a lamp (4). This loop takes ~5ish minutes, and it will usually net you a pile of vials and some quicksilver bullets. If you want to quickly get vials before a boss, do this instead of trying to BUY VIALS. The only time you should buy vials is if you have some extra echoes after leveling and you want a way to use them. You can do this while chatting with the stream between boss attempts, and it will be just as fast as when you fumble around with the menu furiously drinking coldblood dews. Now that you have confidence with both werewolves and trolls this little loop should be no problem. TRUST ME. You can watch me do it in this portion of my latest run. (no spoilers, it's all places you've been before) In three minutes, I collected 14 blood vials, and 5 quicksilver bullets. EDIT: Here is a map, referenced above with numbers.

You can see where I went in the twitch recording (warning: I curse and get pretty salty, but make up for it with enthusiasm later in the run), but I went to Yahar'Gul Unseen Village, which, it turns out, really, really rewards Nick Breckon style play, and not the careful methodical approach I've learned to take throughout. At one point, I was just going in again and again attempting to try to slowly drag my (+40k) blood echoes that I had accrued out to a place where I could get back to the Hunter's Dream and spend them, and at one point I found myself attacked to within a millimeter of my life before pulling it out and rescuing the echoes. Pretty exciting. I think that I'll finish this area and then try both Cainhurst and then the Nightmare Frontier. I went to the latter for a second only to discover that it immediately opens me up to PvP, and someone came and completely flattened me without my understanding. I hear Cainhurst is fun, though! I have the summons, so I can go, but I kind of want to seek vengeance in Yahar'Gul first. I stream a few nights a week, and while I don't have as large a following as Nick, I do think I show about as much emotion as he does. And I explore a bit more than he does, I think.

Ah, question answered! Super exciting. I laughed a lot at the 5 minute teaser! I am excited for you to have an outlet for your interesting conversation without having to constantly chide yourself for not talking about video games.

Should we make threads about Important If True here...or will there be another entire forum section for it?

I beat Rom tonight by calling in a Cooperator. Somewhere, hopefully RayZar_X knows how helpful he was. Thank you, RayZar_X. Afterwards I decided to help out other people, which ended up being super fun. Fighting the Shadows of Yharnam with two other random people is really fun.

So I've been having a fun time with the game, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to beat that spider, Rom. With the other bosses, I could tell that my own skill was the issue, but with Rom, it mostly seems like a bad boss. I haven't spent like, Nick Breckon amounts of time attempting to fight it, because I don't really have Nick Breckon levels of patience. It seems as if there is no real strategy to the fight except to be lucky that one of the little spiders doesn't kill you, or that you can dodge some of the falling projectiles, or that Rom teleports close enough to you that you don't have to deal with the falling projectiles. My buddy told me to ring a bell to summon a friendly player, but the game's been out forever, I doubt many people are itching to help me fight that spider. Otherwise, I think the game is really fantastic, and I've been loving the mood and atmosphere. The level of difficulty has been robust but doable. Until tonight. Bah. A bad boss makes me less interested in trying to go back and play as a result, too!

https://gizmodo.com/leaked-video-reveals-new-boston-dynamics-robot-that-can-1791843388 Welp, calling Robot Newscasters Jake/Chris/Nick

See, the thing is, Nick, this: https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/AttractiveOwlHeyGuys This part where you complain about farming and in the same breath ignore the drop from an enemy (which is likely blood vials), this is maddening.

So, watching Nick play Bloodborne after playing it myself and I think that Nick just is too stubborn for his own good. The game really rewards a kind of slower, more methodical approach near the beginning. Enemies do drop enough blood vials, and what Nick needs to be doing is not Cheatin' Hitman style stuff. When he first started playing, he did amazingly since he kind of took it easy and fought each enemy one at a time. After that, he just decided to spend a bunch of time just trying to run to the Cleric Beast, which costs him vials that he's not recovering, and also caused him to fail repeatedly at different points. This is not how this part of the game was designed, at all. The early part of the game almost requires you to just be patient and kite enemies around so you can defeat them. They will drop blood vials, and you'll start storing them. Also, WIde-Boy, the thing about Amelia that allowed me to beat her (on my first attempt) was just leveling more than I perhaps needed to (I suggest going to a few different places before fighting Amelia, there is actually another boss at the end of the Charnel Lane that's not so bad), and calling Henriett, who helped immensely. As for parrying, Nick practiced on the wrong enemy to practice this on. The way to do it is with those stupid brick trolls. They leave huge openings for parrying. If you start in Central Yharnam and take the left (through the shortcut), you can pick up a bunch of quicksilver bullets from an old man with a gun in the house, and then head down and fight a few brick trolls, which will teach you how to parry. Essentially, you gotta look for the opportunity when they go in for a big attack, and shoot then, and quickly rush in to gouge away with the visceral attack. It's tricky, and very helpful against hunter bosses.

Regarding Star Wars: A New Hope in relation to when it was released, I urge everyone to go and find a copy of J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars, this triumphant, in-depth book about the story behind that movie. It really puts the entirety of the film into context, looking at how a young film student lucked into making this ultra successful wacky nostalgia film about his youth in the 50s and used that fame as leverage to just make his dream sci-fi mashup. Nothing at the time was in any way as bold as Star Wars was; my dad tells me about how he went to see Ralph Bakshi's Wizards like, multiple times in the theatre just to see the trailer. The book has so many incredible stories. Nearly final versions of the film Lucas showed to his friends (you know, "Steven Spielberg" and "Francis Ford Copolla") still didn't have the X-Wing and Tie Fighter shots finished, so he had spliced in 1950s WWII film shots. The film had its budget just slashed repeatedly by Fox, and individual executives had to continually fight to get it made. Hell, there's even a picture of the original hand-written version of opening crawl, which fucking Brian de Palma ended up having to edit down to what ended up in the film. It's nuts. Go buy the book. Also, you get a full description of the evolution of the weird ass script, so you can be one of those nerds who gasps excitedly when a character is described as a "Guardian of the Whills" In Rogue One.

https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/SmilingDonkeyBuddhaBar Oh man, it's nice for him to be back.

https://kotaku.com/ok-bear-with-me-what-if-mario-and-wario-are-the-same-1791132939 Uh oh, this is all hitting the mainstream

So, early in the Blaster Master race, after runner shiningdragoon (on the right) defeated an early boss, skavenger216 (on the left) entered the boss room to discover... (this should start at around 28:52) I do so love when a weird new glitch is discovered during a GDQ stream. It's fun to see skavenger's complete incredulity.

I feel like this might play into the Mario lore from this episode. Supper Mario Broth had a post about this dude here on the right: ...who was removed from Super Mario 3D World, but still exists as an unused graphic in game. Who is this orange S brother? Sario? Where does he fit into the story?

Oh whoops, I was mistaken! I haven't even encountered anything that causes this mechanic yet. : (

I just beat another boss tonight, and I'm about 10ish hours into the game. It's really grown on me, after some early initial frustration. It's still got quite a few fun surprises, and I am liking the challenge a lot. I think that the blood vial system hasn't seemed too silly, I have quite a few in storage, and the game rewards you with enough that I haven't had to grind much. Also, as a person who can be impatient sometimes, the frenzy system is nice for not punishing me too much when I take some hit from a dumb interstitial enemy. I haven't played any of the Souls games, so I'm actually interested in seeing how they compare once I make my way through Bloodborne.

These streams are so great. It has been really incredible seeing the breadth of fantastic games that everyone made for this game jam, jeez. Thanks for posting these streams (and for playing my silly two player game by yourself, and for admitting that you thought Oeuvre referred to an egg, SuperBiasedMan)!

UPDATE: THE GAME IS DONE. After a bit of time trying to figure out how to get it on itch.io to begin with, it's been uploaded to the Wizard Jam. And it features fun local co-op competitive gameplay. And also a bunch of art that I like, because we got oeuvres to consider. Sorry if you don't have another person to play the game with. (Also, there's a pretty innocuous easter egg / secret code in there somewhere.) So. I've done this twice before to like, middling success, and I wanted to try and make another game for this 4th Wizard Jam, but this time, instead of using Lua/Love, I'm going to do this in Pico8, which also uses Lua, but has a better editor for cute pixel art and music. Starting with a new language is perhaps silly, as it's like reinventing the wheel. BUT WHATEVER, LET'S MAKE AN ATTEMPT. It's comforting to know that, like all of the other times, the actual game designer wizards on this forum will just blow me out of the water, either way. I've decided to go with the title of Idle Thumbs 273, or at least the first half of title for Idle Thumbs 273, "Batman Loves Him a Parallelogram." The title refers to Batman Loves Him a Criminal, combined with weird discussion of parallelograms (in regards to Quadrilateral Cowboy) at the beginning of the episode. I don't really have a game idea as of now, but I did figure out how to get a little animated Batman to walk around and jump into the air. (side question, are animated gifs not allowed to be embedded into posts anymore? That's disappointing.) I need to figure out the game, I think. But I want to make sure that I have my movement physics down. Maybe Batman can throw batarangs. All in the service of loving some parallelograms, I suppose.

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you liked the oeuvre portions. As for ESDF, it's the default key mapping for the second player in Pico-8 for some reason? I know it's annoying, but I couldn't figure out how to change it on the HTML version.

Yeah, I've been streaming Bloodborne from my PS4 directly, and with a PS4 camera, you can even do chroma key stuff. It's a very, very good, forward-thinking system they set up for streaming.

Let's imagine that you were not able to watch the original video referenced in this week's Idle Thumbs. Well, unless it gets taken down, you can download it here. You're welcome.

I have started to read Kyir's comments in the streams as if it they were being spoken slowly by a Disney cartoon raven, and it has made everything so much better.

So, I have been playing Bloodborne, after only watching Nick stream Dark Souls 1 and 2. And the game is fun, even if it has been frustrating at times. I'm still kind of getting the hang of it. Here is a fun moment from early on, when, after a couple of hours of frustration with a boss, I finally found vengeance.

https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/AliveWaspNotLikeThis "I haven't seen sconces, where are they"

After watching Nick stream Dark Souls, my buddy convinced me to give Bloodborne a try. It was a frustrating couple of hours, and they're all streamed here, but it was punctuated by this wonderful moment. After dying a bunch of times to that troll sneaking up on me, I decided to take him on and also managed to get VERY LUCKY.