RubixsQube

Gah, Cuphead looks so nice, I love that weird early-color animation blurring they do. COOL IDLE THUMBS EPISODE IMAGE

I'ma call her Turt

https://twitter.com/SakuraiNintendo/status/610251358336323584 !!!

Nintendo drops a new 3DS multiplayer game as Round 2 of this Nintendo World Championships, Blastball, a kind of FPS future soccer-game that looks a lot like Metroid Prime Hunters.

: ( Heavy, long sigh. I went in with the tiniest hope. Oh well. I should have maybe just seen Fury Road again. EDIT: Also Jimmy Buffet's in the movie with some margaritas so, cool job

The Modal Nodes are maybe my favorite jizz band, but sometimes I like Max Rebo's early work with Evar Orbus and His Galactic Jizz-Wailers

Assorted thoughts on what was a fun, wonderful episode of Idle Thumbs: 1) I've been living in New Hampshire for the last three years, and it's amazing how as you go south in New England, you just get closer and closer to Danielle's Rhode Island Voice. If any listener thinks this voice is perhaps "too broad to be realistic", you are wrong, and in fact there are people with thicker, more insane versions of the same accent. What's amazing, however, is as you move up towards northern New England and on up into Maine, you start to get an even weirder New England accent, with a lot of people dropping the strange nothing word "ayah" into sentences. When I was younger, I was in a professional production of Thorton Wilder's Our Town, which is set in the early 1900s in the fictional town of "Grover's Corners, New Hampshire," and for the play I had to work with a dialect coach to get this play's accent juuuuuust right. At the time, I thought, "nobody would ever talk like this," and then I moved to New Hampshire, and nope, people still do. One hundred and fifteen years later, and they still talk like that. 2) There was quite a long period between when Chris brought up creepwatching Whiplash on the plane before I realized he wasn't talking about that not-so-great roller derby film Whip It. AND LET ME TELL YOU, that was pretty strange. 3) I really want to be the person who watches Farscape alongside Danielle, as I've never seen it, but have a huge deep dumb working knowledge of Star Trek. I can even come at it from the astronomy angle, and use this PhD for good rather than evil. BUT oh yeah, I'm just a reader, and I don't live in San Francisco. 4) I was walking across campus when I said (louder than I actually realized because some of the construction workers who are putting up the graduation seats for this weekend paused and gave me a weird look) "Max Reebo. Max Reebo! Max Reebo." And then luckily Nick chimed in and said, "Max Reebo." Thanks, Nick. I like Nick a lot. 5) This week and last week's episodes reminded me that I need to write in about the one game my dad played (and then stopped playing games), which was the SNES Jurassic Park if you can believe it.

Those fails, BigJKO, are just comedy gold.

I had to go and find footage of the Dreamcast Track and Field goofy stamina-loss dash:

I know this! But if he's going to make such a direct homage to the Metroid games, he's inviting the comparison himself.

I'm six or seven hours into the game, and I have a great deal of weapons and maneuvering updates. The game is fun, obviously, or I wouldn't have kept playing, but it's sloppy. I guess, in case people are worried about spoilers, I'll try to talk about things in a vague and general sense. - I think the bosses, while interesting visually, have all just been tedious bullet sponges. Like, you show up, you see what they do, and then you just repeat the same stuff over and over hoping that you don't get hit too much before they finally die. I mean, going back to the Metroid games, I think that the patterns just seemed more random for those bosses, and they were able to die a lot quicker than the tedious boss slog in Axiom Verge. The most recent boss I managed to beat on like, my tenth attempt, and it was slightly more random, but it was still just annoying, where I kept thinking: "I am doing the thing you want me to do, video game, I am doing it over and over, you should just reward me and respect my time here." - I started playing the game in my ideal form, where I just remapped the keyboard to an SNES controller and played that way, but it quickly became too ungainly in terms of the sheer number of different inputs that I had to learn. I switched to an Xbox 360 controller, but playing 2D platformers with a stick removes a lot of important timing, and the 360 controller has the World's Worst D-Pad, so I just keep the SNES controller handy for when I have to make a series of tight jumps. Even worse, later in the game you receive an item that requires you to double tap the control pad, which is my least favorite method of input, since it's so finicky. It's been insanely tedious to have to use that quickly to maneuver, and it also means that it triggers sometimes when I don't want it to, leaving me running into enemies. Oh! Also, the 360 controller uses L3 and R3 to quick swap weapons, and I am always accidentally triggering that in the heat of battle, which is a pain. This is sloppy, video game. - The game has some interesting enemy types, and being able to glitch them out is a fun idea. I also think it does a great job of letting you come back through the game with better weapons and just annihilate the enemies that were tedious earlier. - You know what's disappointing? Discovering a secret, making your way through a series of enemies, excitedly finding a new item, and then realizing it's just fucking lore, and even WORSE, it's in some dumb alien language. I think that I got something that would allow me to translate it, but why? The storyline of the game is the thing I'm least interested in. - You get so many weapons in this game, and I only ended up using most of them for a little bit after I got it, and then never again. There was one weapon that was mega weak but spread out with this lightning effect that I actually ended up using exclusively on a later boss, but otherwise, back to the old standby guns. Am I the only person who felt this way? - Drone / Drone Throw / Drone Teleport? Pretty great. - I have found so many areas that I know are gated off for some future item for maneuvering, and at that point, I'll probably just look up some giant map online and clear out all of the items. I don't have time to explore and mark up the map, sorry, game. Again, I'm liking it, overall. The music, while a little repetitive (the loops are just a little too short), is appropriately pumping, the running and jumping feels good, and I think it's got an ok difficulty. I just wish that it had that type of Nintendo polish that would have really made it great.

IT IS SO GOOD

This is wonderful.

A) I want to put this on the new page because I really like this gif and this post Because of how often I wanted to be able to just get to the start of this song, I made a url: http://tinyurl.com/dmxthuglife that just takes you right there C) ok this is the only time I'm not going to to go out of my way to change that stupid sunglasses smiley face

Here is the link to the original reddit post, with a bunch of videos. At one point in the cast, Danielle mentioned how silly the names of video games are when they've been created for television episodes, but I have a feeling if you were to be able to see modern actual video game titles from some distance, they're equally as baffling. I mean, Danielle herself talked about some game called Will Fight for Food: Super Actual Sellout: Game of the Hour last week, which I know is intentionally dumb, but still. Flappy Bird is the name of a game that people are ok with. Just looking at modern game titles, I discovered there's a game called Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory Re;Birth 3: V Century. There is no way that hollywood screenwriters can create dumber video game titles than we give them ourselves.

I have no experience making video games. That being said, I think it'd be really fun to make a game here, just to join in the fun. And, to make my life easy, I'm making: " " - a flash rhythm space shooting game, about pizzas, and following directions. (In the above linked clip, you can hear Nick Breckon say "shoot that pizza slice," presumably referring to this mini-game) I'm going to be making the game in Stencyl, which I spent two or three hours playing with last night. It's not ideal, but I think that once I get the hang of it I can probably do what I want. One of the tutorials was for making a Space Invaders style game, so that's where I'll be starting. My goal is to make a kind of silly mini game. I'll leave the real big deal games for all of the more experienced folk. It'd be great if you played as a space turret shooting moving pizza slices in time with some fun song, but, in the same vein as Rhythm Heaven, I might want to include audio clips of myself with directions ("shoot that pizza" is just a funny thing to say out loud, much less give as an order). My tasks then, are: - Get a game running whereby I can shoot a target (pizza slice, duh) that moves across the screen. - Add in the functionality such that I can provide a list of times that trigger the target to move across the screen. - See about getting the timing worked out such that the pizza slices are hit on the beats. (This is probably going to be one of the harder aspects to this project, I am sure, but other people have thought about Stencyl rhythm games) - Add in the assets, like art and music. - Polish, polish, polish. My goal for tonight and this weekend is probably just the first two tasks. Thinking further down the line, ;ast night I was listening to some of SpacemanToby's music, and I might ask to use one of his tracks. Essentially, I just want this to be mega, mega silly. I'll be using this little thread to record my progress (and to lay claim on a great and dumb episode title), and I hope that I don't end up "ruining the surprise."

Yeah, I played some more, since I had just moved from LA and missed it dearly, but damn if that game isn't a cesspool of this juvenile "hardcore/adult" sensibility and attempts at humor. It's incredibly offensive at every turn, and just terribly, terribly acted and written. I would love if the people who worked on the city of Los Santos were to mutiny against the people who write the game and create the characters. Chris' description in the podcast of the early part of the game where you "just click on policemen and they die" (I am paraphrasing) seems like so much of AAA game-making. Click on people and they die, click click click. There is so much fun that can be had in Los Santos, just playing around, and hardly any of it is in the click on people and they die vein, and none of it requires actually trying to play the primary, dumb-ass game.

Thanks! I think that, compared to the other excellent games that are a part of this jam, mine is pretty silly, but I'm happy considering it is very near what I set out to do, without experience. I'm really happy for the help from Synnah and especially the art from lloydp.

IT IS. It is one of the best demonstrations of what the Wii U was supposed to be. I want to reiterate that the game had my buddy and I laughing throughout, not just at the clever writing and story, but at the absurdity of our (many, many) deaths. Danielle! Stream it (with JAKE, PLEASE, THAT'D BE GREAT) on twitch!

I second that request! That's the only regret I have about this wizard jam, is it reminds me that as a Mac-only gamer, a lot of cool indie stuff is not playable.

: ( I guess I can't please everyone. The dumb jokes do rely very heavily on specific american pizza references. For you, imagine if one of the internal systems was called Cockpit Auto-Pilot Engage Response System (C.A.P.E.R.S.)

I started to fall into the abyss near the end, but I think that you can just have an infinite number of jumps after the first one, and I soared to victory! Really fun / weird tumblethumb