Jake

Idle Thumbs 213: Build the Nublar

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Idle Thumbs 213:

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Build the Nublar

Terraforming is complete. The fences are placed. Administrative staff is happy, buzzing away in their newly-zoned facility. This is it. This one will be perfect. But no, work halts: An error message. The face on your screen is not one you recognize. It's definitely not Dr. Wright. "Ah ahh ahh." You dismiss it. "Ah ahh ahh. Ah ahh ahh." Your clicks are drowned out by a barrage of dick picks and photos of cartoon cat butts.

Games Discussed: Life is Strange, Neko Atsume, Cobra Club, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, Team Fortress 2, Axiom Verge

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Danielle is talking about Life is Strange! I am a confirmed fanboy of Hella Teen Adventures, I'm really glad someone is talking about this game now because it's the best.

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Oh man, I am excited about the Neko Atsume discussion! This game has taken on a strange obsession among my circle of friends for the last month. I think I almost ready to leave it behind now that I am very close to having observed all the cats.

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The discussion is pretty brief so you will probably be disappointed! None of us are playing it but many of our significant others are being swallowed up by it.

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Look, I'm firmly in the neo-endearment crowd and talking shit about Neko Atsume

 

*inserts pic of cat asshole*

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My significant other also plays a lot of neko atsume. 

 

The name of the game, overly-word-for-word-literally translated to "cat collect", can't help but remind me of this thing.

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While I'm looking forward to playing Life Is Strange, despite that it means suffering super awkward dialogue (although they still have time to fix this), it seems like the developers saw many recent games and wanted to combine a bunch of shit at once. It feels maybe a little cheap? I see they took Infamous Second Son crammed it together with Walking Dead, sprinkled some Gone Home, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and then based it upon the time rewind sections of Remember Me (the best parts). I suppose none of this is bad but since all of this stuff is in my recent memory, it's a bit strange. Life is strange.

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For what it's worth, "go fuck your selfie" definitely sounds like something from Mean Girls.

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I'm with Danielle that I like weird stuff. Almost all media feels fake to me anyway so I'm not looking for a natural immersing experience. So what alienates most people just feels interesting and new to me.

Also the childhood reminiscing reminded me of my old books I wrote such as Mutant Zombies and the Zombie Slayer. The former had an ancient Irish monk cursed with immortality because he wrote the zombie book, the latter featured a fight with death (who had future weapons), both were inspired by Resident Evil 2 to the point that they both feature Rookie cops.

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The discussion is pretty brief so you will probably be disappointed! None of us are playing it but many of our significant others are being swallowed up by it.

 

You are wrong, I was not disappointed!

 

I found it hilarious that your girlfriend was checking the game at 3 AM or whatever to see if there were special night cats. I don't think I know anyone that has gone THAT deep with the game. I like it just because of how passive the experience is compared to other games. I'm really into the idea of games that basically run on their own in the background with minimal interference from the player.

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Life is Strange is at times both enjoyable and odd for different reasons - I like that there's literally ANY games where you can play a teen girl but the fact that it is dude developers and writers lurking behind all the dialogue and stuff is palpable. It's weird but it's so thoroughly transparent that it pulls me out of the story a lot. It's also like, uh, yet another story with teen girls where there's a rape subplot. 

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Life is Strange is at times both enjoyable and odd for different reasons - I like that there's literally ANY games where you can play a teen girl but the fact that it is dude developers and writers lurking behind all the dialogue and stuff is palpable. It's weird but it's so thoroughly transparent that it pulls me out of the story a lot. It's also like, uh, yet another story with teen girls where there's a rape subplot. 

 

Ughhh... having only played the first episode thus far, I didn't know about that subplot (unless I'm being completely thick). That's really disappointing...

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Hearing the word anime in the cast made me excitedly open gmail and click compose, wait for discussion, then disappointedly close the browser after hearing nothing about it. I was bummed until I reminded myself that whatever I was about to write was probably garbage and that this is a video game podcast.

 

 

Life is Strange is at times both enjoyable and odd for different reasons - I like that there's literally ANY games where you can play a teen girl but the fact that it is dude developers and writers lurking behind all the dialogue and stuff is palpable. It's weird but it's so thoroughly transparent that it pulls me out of the story a lot.

 

This is also part of the reason why that I feel apprehensive about media that's includes young people but is probably written by older guys (a lot of anime), or anything that feels intentionally vicarious or constructed to be personal. There's a point where it becomes obvious that the audience and the author are trying to participate in a strange role playing where there shouldn't be any.

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Regarding Chris briefly mentioning that his phone number was only one away from the horse track: the annual tradition of NORAD tracking Santa Claus on Christmas Eve started in 1955 when a Sears department store released a flyer with a phone number where children could call Santa on Christmas Eve. The phone number was misprinted, and the resultant number was the top-secret military phone line for the Colorado Springs Continental Air Defense Command Center.

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Ughhh... having only played the first episode thus far, I didn't know about that subplot (unless I'm being completely thick). That's really disappointing...

Yeah, it is. Which sucks because I like a lot of the stuff with Chloe and Max! (I'm almost done with Episode 2.) It just pulled me back a bit. 

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I suppose I'll have to just play Life Is Strange.  It seems very divisive among critics. I kinda love that Cara Ellison hates it so much.

Also, regarding French teams making American girl things:

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I wanted to comment on the use of the phrase "bubble hearth" in Life is Strange - Max doesn't just say that apropos of nothing like it's a bit of cool teen slang, in that scene she's talking to another character (Warren) on the phone.

 

We can't hear his half of the conversation, but Max is like "Warren, we need your help" and Warren must say something to the effect of "I'm busy playing Warcraft" to which Max replies "Oh you'll be fine, just bubble hearth."

 

 

So like, in that context I don't think it's super weird. It's still a phrase that'll be pretty badly dated when nobody remembers paladins could do that, but it doesn't just come out of nowhere.

 

 

Spaff bringing that up led to a nice bit of discussion about what you can get away with when you're referencing other things in the same medium though, so that was good.

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I still don't even know what bubble hearth means and I've played that game.

as a paladin you cast that invulnerability shield then use your hearthstone. Its a way to GTFO of any situation.

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The discussion about Life Is Strange's ludo-narrative resonance reminded me of that show where the teenage girl could clap her hands to pause time and rearrange things so orange-juice wouldn't spill and all that.

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Chris's BIGWARS story about creating his own acronymical RPG ruleset without knowing much about RPGs is completely valid.

 

When Fallout was first announced, the article I read about it said something like, "Fallout was originally going to be based on GURPS, but instead Interplay made their own system, SPECIAL, which stands for your attributes of Strength, Perception..."

 

So besides the barest details of its setting, the first thing I knew about Fallout was its ruleset.  I find that odd, but do true RPG fans, when they hear about a new one, cross their arms and go, "Well, what's the ruleset?"

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The presence of the Final Fantasy movie in Life is Strange is more than a little... strange... because the game is being published by Square Enix. Max's comment about it is, "I don't care what anybody says, that's one of the best sci-fi films ever made." Having recently rewatched it, I can say that it's terribleness is probably one of the universe's only objectively verifiable truths. There was a similar easter egg in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, with posters advertising Final Fantasy 24. I'm not sure if they're meant as a low-key tribute to Square or as a sarcastic condemnation.

 

I really want to play Life is Strange, but the writing is just so cringeworthy that I stopped halfway through the second episode. It's definitely better than the first episode, but it continuing to exist is just baffling. I don't understand how someone could think that anybody other than a twelve-year-old commenting on Minecraft videos would talk like that. I don't understand how nobody else recognized it before putting it into production. I don't understand how the voice actors saying those lines didn't bring it up. And after three episodes of feedback to that effect, I don't understand how it's still happening.

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There are people who love that movie, though. I've met them in real life!

 

I haven't play Life Is Strange, yet, but that does sound a little too on-the-nose.

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While listening to the Bowser Junior talk my phone just randomly started playing Mulatu Astatke without me having pressed any buttons which gave me the impression that the conversation was taking a very long time and Chris put in music to show the passing of time, but the music kept playing. I was excited that Chris was a Mulatu Astatke fan, but I was also increasingly confused. It was surreal.

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So besides the barest details of its setting, the first thing I knew about Fallout was its ruleset.  I find that odd, but do true RPG fans, when they hear about a new one, cross their arms and go, "Well, what's the ruleset?"

 

Maybe not the crossy arm part, but yeah, the mechanics of the game are far more important than the setting.  The most amazing, inventive, incredible setting for a game ever won't be interesting at all if its tethered to a broken, unfun ruleset. 

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