mikemariano

It makes more sense than the actual upcoming plot point of

When playing Metroid Fusion I sometimes forgot that I wasn't controlling Super Metroid Samus. I got myself killed doing that!

I'm glad Mike is having such fun with his ridiculous storyline. Nadine, too. Norma and Ed aren't in this episode at all, are they? Oh, Druids. OK.

We will have to settle for a Ken Burns style documentary with close-up zooms of stills from the game while Sam Waterston reads their Slack chats.

More Americans should read—then re-read—this sentence.

As an original UK Idle Thumbs host, Spaff has always been with us.

Man, I played about ten minutes of this game a year+ ago then stopped. Finally I can play Broken Age and watch the documentary!

The Thimbleweed Park weblog has also expanded to a weekly podcast, which is kind of fun to hear how this two-man team is putting the game together. In the most recent blog entry, Gary Winnick gives some inside information about Maniac Mansion character creation! Man, this takes me back to my days endlessly refreshing the SCUMM Bar website...

It means you will be unable to play this game without hearing the theme song in your head. That's why I'm glad the Campo Santo team didn't keep their original title for Firewatch: "Hen' in Black."

I played the browser version of Westerado but stopped when I realized it was huge for a browser game. The process of cocking your gun and lining up a shot was too nerve-wracking! The comments in this RPS overview give a good idea of what to expect from the Steam version Westerado: Double Barreled. Unfortunately, one of the developers shows up and says he still loves the Will Smith Wild Wild West movie.

While I was watching the next episode or two, I made up a reason for this: There is no basis in the show for any of my rationalization.

Last night I finally beat every boss with every (not hard to unlock) character! I love you, Blue Baby! I have three tearless challenges I just haven't gotten any better at completing: Solar System, Cat Got Your Tongue, and Beans! Is there any good advice for conserving bombs or flinging a hairball around?

I was thinking about this game.

I just spent two and a half hours throwing more than a hundred skeletons at King My-Wife-Gave-Me-A-Hollowborn-Baby, doing an average of one hit point of damage per wave. I hid my party on each side of the throne room: Durance and Fleur in the stairwell and Edér and Kana in the bedroom, and Aloth sacrificing himself as the one to trigger the conversation with the King. The guards quickly found Durance and Fleur, killing them and taking no damage. On the other side skeletons slowly weakened a group of three guards. I had Edér join in, thinking he and three skeletons could handle three Near Death guards, but they all survived and quickly killed the guy who shouldn't be quick to kill. Only Kana was left. Eventually skeletons killed everyone except for the King and the archer. They survived about four waves of skeletons without taking a single point of damage. I decided to send Kana in as a last-ditch effort. A tutorial tip popped up, mentioning Kana was outmatched by the King—Kana would never score a critical hit and probably wouldn't even hit him. I hadn't seen a tutorial tip in forever! Now it was popping up only to tell me: "You can't win." Kana began casting a knock-people-over chant while the skeletons distracted the archer. The King walked over to Kana, swung his sword once, and killed him. I have been in this castle for almost a day in game and over a week in real life. I thought I could finish up here and then reshape my party using Sorbicol's advice, but it seems the only way to do that will be to go back to the save from when I first got the stronghold. I've come up with the most miserable, joyless way to play this game: "throw a skeleton at it."

Oh man, I am lucky. EXAMPLE: "Still upset I cannot smooch Aloth in game he is too perfect this is a crime. Give me my elf kisses." Thanks! I've been doing mostly that but maybe I need to finally hire a custom character to get an animal friend! And everybody seems to be extremely vulnerable to status effects. Spirits will confuse my entire party before they can land a hit. Spiders poison Edér so badly he isn't much of a shield. I thought a potion or a spell from Durance could alleviate this but nothing I tried did much.

Having a chubby, rough-voiced bartender in this episode made me think of Jacques Renault. As if this guy talking to Annie was a White Lodge doppelganger or something. He didn't tell Heather Graham to "bite the bullet, baby," so that's good. The actor Jack McGee has thirty years of steady television credits! But I'm pretty sure this is the only time I've seen him.

Oh man, if they have a Guitar Hero: Rock-A-Fire Explosion expansion that would be awesome. I will 100% "Love In This Club" on Expert!

Yeah. He shoots his arrow once, misses, then switches to his sword and shoves people three times, which supposedly opens enemies up for more damage while they're on the ground but everyone else is a puny weakling. Eder stays alive the longest, though! I've finally started to just have Durance fire off every single spell and zap people with a stick instead of hiding, and that does a little bit, but if my positioning is off by a little bit he gets swarmed and dies. Also I should probably put this in the Mass Effect romance thread but I'm pretty sure my blue Avatar lady Fleur slept with Eder on the first night and regrets it. He's a small town, sensitive hunk—charming at first, until you realize he doesn't know any conversation topics besides Eothas and his brother. Meanwhile Aloth wakes me up every night to ask me how I'm feeling. Not gonna happen, man.

I don't understand the combat at all. Supposedly positioning is important, but apparently I'm too clumsy and enemies will just run past me in a door frame to kill my archer. Here is how I killed insane magic guy: Kept useless wizard in the room while everybody else ran two rooms away. Useless wizard died in less than a second, before he could even open his grimoire. I waited for my chanter to chant long enough to summon some skeletons. The skeletons ran to the other room and hacked at the insane magic guy. Repeat four times until he dies. This is the only winning strategy I can find for this game: hide and wait for skeletons.

Joseph Campbell's The Guitar Hero's Journey

Wow, that Frank Lantz story is amazing. Two years ago in the Episode 96 episode thread, I had mentioned that I was addicted to Chain Factor, going so far as to play an Internet Archive copy of it after the official site went down. Chris then replied that Chain Factor was the same game as Drop7. I felt like a fool; I knew I was playing a game that was somehow connected to the show Numbers, but to know that it was just a rip-off of some professional game? So shameful! I never did download Drop7, though. I kept playing Chain Factor. I played it this morning. So now to learn that Chain Factor was the original version of this game makes me...actually, I'm still playing a futile Flash game habitually for 4+ years, so I guess I'm now just experiencing a slightly different flavor of shame...

I only slept with you for the Xbox Live Achievement.

During the podcast you and Chris asked: who was that guy who got knocked out at the Bookhouse? I thought, "Oh, that's the officer Cooper and Truman assigned to keep an eye on Harry." But I think I just made that up. Also, it's interesting that you refer to weaselcam as a Sam Raimi shot in the context of episodes 27 and 28...

I don't watch Mad Men but do they talk about the guy from Mad Men who's the guy from Firewatch on The End of Mad Men podcast?

The former two helped me do it all non-lethal, but it was still tough!