Chris

Idle Thumbs 217: To Have a Life

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Is it weird that during the Sleep No More discussion, all I could think of was how awesome a Hitman level set in Sleep No More would be?

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Is it weird that during the Sleep No More discussion, all I could think of was how awesome a Hitman level set in Sleep No More would be?

 

Finally, when I run around as Agent 47 in the nude I'll fit right in!

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Ah, Morrison's and the artists' he worked with run on Batman was a fun read.

 

I love almost all of Morrison's other work, and I love the elevator pitch of his run but no matter how hard I try I can't get into it. I've read Batman & Son like four times now, and it never clicks. Still, starting that is what made me read Final Crisis, and that book is fantastic.

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Has anyone here played Aisle, by Sam Barlow? Danielle, if you read this, I think you'll really like it. It's a 1999 text adventure that was a Big Deal in the interactive fiction community. I came to it about 3 years ago and fell in love. It showed me the joy of a text parser, without the mental overhead required to use keywords and things like that. Aisle only allows the player to enter one command before the game ends.

 

You are an old man in a grocery store aisle. What do you do?

 

From that, you make your request, the game responds, and you reset to that moment. You can "Remember the past", where you learn he had a wife, then "think about wife", and she died in a tragic accident, then "Remember the accident" which might have been a car crash. Or you could, I don't know. "take off your clothes". "pick up corn". "kiss the woman in the aisle" Etc, etc.

 

In many ways, Her Story is a more palatable, updated sequel to Aisle. They both offer a single point from which you access the past in a nonlinear fashion. I hesitate to say it, but I think I prefer Her Story. There's something beautiful in the spaces left to the imagination in Aisle, but it has in my opinion the critical flaw of presenting multiple pasts. There's an interesting mechanic where you can track what timeline you're in, but that's neither here nor there. Sean and Jake talked about the necessity of having all of Lee's possible statements in the walking dead being 'Lee canon'. That's not the case in Aisle.

I've played this and I guess I just didn't remember it was by the same guy. Write in to [email protected] about this!

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The reaction to how Batman looks in the Arkham games has always struck me as odd. Is it because everyone has a specific idea of what Batman looks like in their head, which is based on how he is portrayed in the movies, rather than the comics? He has always been shown to be that large, if not larger in the comics, with exceptions like the aforementioned David Mazzucchelli portrayal. However, in that portrayal, Batman is in his first year on the job, and is therefore much younger and at that point did not have to fight supernatural enemies. Later in his career, he becomes a man who can supposedly bench-press 1000 pounds, so his size is well-justified. The image of Batman on his Wikipedia page, by Jim Lee clearly shows a Batman with biceps much larger than his head, and is very much in line with his Arkham games depiction.

 

Comic_Art_-_Batman_by_Jim_Lee_%282002%29

 

vs

 

arkham.jpg

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What throws me is the use of kevin conroys voice. The second I hear him talk I instantly think of Batman TAS, but instead I see Beefy McBats instead. Joker was less jarring but still off.

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Please please talk more about Her Story (with spoilers!) in the next podcast! I would love to listen to more about what the Thumbs think about it!

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I had a customized lullaby cassette tape that my parents got from mailing Pampers UPCs to a PO Box. "Patrick...it's time to go to sleep Patrick."

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I liked the apology for being assholes for the first batch of episodes. While I don't think the thumbs gang was any worse than most of the gaming podcasts of that era, it was jarring to hear "rape" and "retarded" tossed around so liberally (I recently listened to a couple earlier episodes as well after being fairly late to the party). It's good to grow and acknowledge our past faults! Also takes some guts to own up to it.  :tup:  :tup:  :tup:

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I had to stop the podcast at the "customized birthday/Captain zoom" segment, because I recently discovered that someone has made "[name] is a smoking hot babe" with 500 different names and put them all on Spotify

 

They're all exactly 1 minute long, there's 100 to an album, and each album cover is just a shitty flash photo of some girl. The band is, of course, called the Smoking Hot Babe Lovers.

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I had to stop the podcast at the "customized birthday/Captain zoom" segment, because I recently discovered that someone has made "[name] is a smoking hot babe" with 500 different names and put them all on Spotify

 

They're all exactly 1 minute long, there's 100 to an album, and each album cover is just a shitty flash photo of some girl. The band is, of course, called the Smoking Hot Babe Lovers.

 

Ah, yes. I suspected and confirmed that song is from Matt Farley. Essentially, he has created music about a variety of subjects and often just replaces a name/object in the lyrics of a song that's musically the same. He sings birthday songs, city songs, sports team songs, and office supplies along with other stuff that ranges from mundane to bizarre. He has managed to eek out a living through Spotify by having a glut of tunes.

 

You can hear his story (which is far more interesting than what I've laid out here) in this podcast.

 

The Wherehouse used to make custom mixtapes and when I was a kid I had one that consisted of Chuck Berry, engines revving, and rainstorms. Apparently it helped me get to sleep.

 

Lastly, I'd love to hear you guys do a spoiler bit on Her Story.

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I made a horrible vault by not allowing anyone to have sex until I had two SPECIAL-maxed black dwellers. I then ejected any white people out into the wasteland to die and started breeding super-human black babies from the alpha-male and -female pairing.

 

I have no idea what life would be like in that vault but it probably started off super friendly and that got real bad real fast.

 

 

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I was surprised to hear the thumbs all agree that Aladdin doesn't hold up. I watched the blu-ray recently, and I thought it looked gorgeous. The narrative's tight, it's full of great lines and performances and character animation.

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I'd be sad if Aladdin doesn't hold up, because it's got my favourite Disney musical soundtrack.

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Speaking of Lego Jurassic World and Her Story's 90s computer interface, is there a Lego version of the "Unix" system Lex uses in Jurassic Park?

 

Tangentially related, but in case anyone didn't know, the file system browser in Jurassic Park was actually a real thing that was developed by SGI.

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I'm pretty happy that we're in an era where people are making games that act as old PC simulations. I haven't played Her Story yet (definitely looking forward to it though!), but I've been playing a bit of TIS-100 lately, and I am really into the simulation they designed. The game was made by Zachtronics, the developer behind excruciatingly difficult puzzle games Spacechem, and Infinifactory. The conceit is it is the 1970s (I think?) and your uncle from Silicon Valley has died, and his aunt gives you this crazy computer he inherited. When you start the game up it tells you to print out the instruction manual. The pdf file is done up in the super dry technical style of the era. That it looks like some crappy mimeograph copy is a really nice touch. There's some mystery to the game because as you fix various programs in the game you'll come across these comments that your uncle left, but basically the game is just solving these puzzles of getting inputs to do certain things, and transfer to outputs, and your toolkit is a simplified version of assembly language. Don't know how much appeal the game really has because write assembly language to solve puzzles is not much of a hook for a game, but I dig it.

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Just wanted to throw in some stuff about Punchdrunk, the company that created Sleep No More. I used to be pretty obsessed with them and learnd a lot of suff that might be a little out of date now.

 

First of all they're amazing. I'm pretty positive Sleep No More was workshopped in Boston for a short time before it came to New York, but there are no other actualy Sleep No More venues. The have a seires of shows or events that they put on between the US and England. They're very secretive.

 

 

I have hear that the turnover on actors and technicians on the show is crazy.

 

I also read an article once about how they lead one of their members on this insane real life scavenger hunt that they designed where they just started sending him keys and creepy letters in the mail, which ended up just leading him to his birthday party.

I think I would have called the cops if it had happened to me though.

I'll see if I can find the article.

(Edit: Here is the article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/fashion/01POSSESSED.html)

 

But also, go see it because it is amazing.

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Loved the story of Chris' vault. He is approaching Nick level of fucked-upness in strategy/simulation games.

 

Regarding Danielle's comment about the quality of Witcher 3 quests, here is the most memorable side quest I have encountered so far. Spoilers for Black Pearl side quest ahead. No spoilers for the main quest line.

An old soldier asks you to meet him in Skellige and help him find a rare black pearl that he promised his wife a long time ago. He finally decides to fulfil this promise but has grown old in the meantime and needs your help. If I remember correctly, he does not tell you why he suddenly considers an old promise to be so important.

 

You meet the man in Skellige and he shows you where he thinks the black pearl can be found. He is too weak (?) to dive there himself, so you offer to go instead. While you are diving for the seashells you are attacked by a couple of sirens. Once you have dealt with them and found the black pearl, you start to swim back to the shore. Suddenly the man is attacked by drowners, but he manages to defend himself until your arrival. You give him the pearl, and he thanks you and asks you to meet him again in Novigrad for the reward.

 

You travel back to Novigrad and meet him in an inn and he gives you a small reward. He says that he thinks his wife likes the pearl. When you make a comment about his wife sounding a bit ungrateful, he says that things are a bit more complicated than that. Apparently, the wife has gradually started to lose her memory and now has troubles recognizing people, even her husband. The husband thought that by bringing her this pearl that they have talked about so much in the past would somehow reverse the process. Unfortunately, it did not.

 

 

I can't help but think that if this was Rockstar game, it would be revealed in the end that the wife has been dead for 10 years, and the insane husband has been nursing her rotting corpse all this time.

(Some parts of Red Dead Redemption were so fucking stupid.)

 

Oof, Nappi I'm with you. That quest also hit me really hard. I was dumbstruck waiting for the followup, and there wasn't one. That was just it. Such a strong emotional moment.

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I have to be a lame pedant and correct Jake about Arkham City.  At one point in the cast Jake wonders why everyone who moved out of the city in Arkham City would move back in, only to be evacuated again in Knight.  Arkham City was a section of Gotham that got walled off and turned into a prison, so the only inhabitants of 'Arkham City' were criminals (or political prisoners) and the guards.  The guards were all from a military contractor named TYGER, who were in turn being controlled by Hugo Strange, the prison's warden and a Batman villain who knows Batman's secret identity.

 

Also, Chris expressed interest in a mod that lets you play as Bruce Wayne.  Well that mod came out like a week after the game.  It lets you play as 10 characters in free roam

Red Hood, Harley Quinn, Nightwing, Robin, Azrael, Bruce Wayne, Catwoman, Commissioner Gordon, Joker, and GCPD Officer Owens

 

Finally, I'm really bummed to hear that DisneyQuest is going away.  I haven't been to a Disney park in years and I only remember three things from my last trip: the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular, a waterslide called the Humunga Kowabunga, and DisneyQuest.  DisneyQuest was by far my favorite thing at Disney.  I remember going on that ride that let you build a roller coaster, as well as some other kind of VR thing that involved what was basically a lightsaber.  That place blew my young early teen mind.

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An episode of 99% Invisible was mentioned on this episode, does anyone knows what it was? I can't find the moment when it's mentioned

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I was surprised to hear the thumbs all agree that Aladdin doesn't hold up. I watched the blu-ray recently, and I thought it looked gorgeous. The narrative's tight, it's full of great lines and performances and character animation.

This. Aladdin is still the best disney animation.

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