Jake

Idle Thumbs 219: Idiots Laughing

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Idle Thumbs 219:

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Idiots Laughing

After years away, we found ourselves this week trapped in surreal spaces filled with otherworldly lights and sounds, dodging indistinct figures that triggered sensory responses unlike any offered in the normal world. We wore virtual reality headsets, and we went to E3.

Games Discussed: Superhot, Cuphead, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, SUPERHYPERCUBE, Super Mario Maker, NYTimes Crossword, Spelunky

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Jake, the selfie Zelda was Wind Waker HD (there hasn't been an Ocarina HD) and those selfies were totally an intentional feature.

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Join us on an accidental tour of our own history of first person shooting

 

They stole my idea!

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On the topic of the phenomenon of personalized audio tracks, I just found out today that Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, the artists behind the local Chicago classic rock smash song

(if you live outside of Chicago you've probably never heard it, but it's a classic rock radio staple out here) offer personalized versions of the song for sixty bucks. It sounds like pretty much any three syllables will do, so maybe we should make them do an Idle Thumbs version.

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Robert Picardo is known almost exclusively to me for being the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager. He's easily the actor with the most range and the most weirdness on a show full of weird dudes and ladies (I'm looking at Tim Russ and Kate Mulgrew in particular), so he's just as interesting a choice as Jeff Goldblum to me.

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I was coming to say that as well as Star Trek, Picardo was in a load of Joe Dante films, notably InnerSpace and Gremlins 2.

Re. the Cave Johnson soundalike in Portal Stories,

I believe the official plot summary refers to a "fake Cave Johnson" as being one of the central mysteries.

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Idiots laughing is very appropriate. Your fallout shelter discussion caused me to break out in laughter on the train, thus making me look like an idiot too.

 

I would argue that co-op Selfie-stick Doom kind of already exists in the back-to-back bro gameplay of Army of Two, just in a slightly less ridiculous fashion and attitude.

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I would argue that co-op Selfie-stick Doom kind of already exists in the back-to-back bro gameplay of Army of Two, just in a slightly less ridiculous fashion and attitude.

 

That game also had plenty of ridiculous fashion

 

m3L9AeD3MdVVvzS98TDx5Zw.jpg

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I was coming to say that as well as Star Trek, Picardo was in a load of Joe Dante films, notably InnerSpace and Gremlins 2.

Re. the Cave Johnson soundalike in Portal Stories,

I believe the official plot summary refers to a "fake Cave Johnson" as being one of the central mysteries.

That makes me feel a little better about things, but it's not remotely raised in the first hour or so of the game so it just comes across as "bad," instead. I'm glad they tried any of the humor content, though. Had it been silent and devoid of voice it would have felt like that beautiful but tone deaf Portal fan film that was just leaping around and sentry action sequences, kind of missing the point.

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That makes me feel a little better about things, but it's not remotely raised in the first hour or so of the game so it just comes across as "bad," instead.

 

Virgil has some initial vocal hesitation as "Cave," so I think that's supposed to be the way they clue you in that something is up.

 

Story-wise Portal Stories is just "more Portal 2," but puzzle-wise it retained the looser feel of Portal 1 and some of the insane difficulty of the best-slash-worst Perpetual Testing maps.

 

Towards the end you are in unfinished test chambers and I spent a half-hour bouncing around, trying to get to a button that wasn't attached to anything.  Fun times!

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I was coming to say that as well as Star Trek, Picardo was in a load of Joe Dante films, notably InnerSpace and Gremlins 2.

Re. the Cave Johnson soundalike in Portal Stories,

I believe the official plot summary refers to a "fake Cave Johnson" as being one of the central mysteries.

 

May I refer you to this Thrilling Adventure Hour episode in which they couldn't book John Dimaggio to play his role as Captain Laserbeam that night, so they recast with Keegan Michael Key for the episode and then made it a running joke?

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jake: fatal frame but with a selfie stick

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Somebody revive that Idle Thumbs Animated trend and illustrate Chris's fallout shelter stories, please. So good

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Chris, when you send your superpersons out into the wasteland did they ever start to find really, really good gear? I started to lose interest when I would have people be out for full days at a time but they were continuing to come back with the same 5-7 damage rifles and lounge wear that the 4 hour trips were finding but just in greater volume. It felt like the only thing that was progressing was the physical size of my vault. I want power armor and plasma rifles, too.

 

 

 

Robert Picardo sounds like the fake Cave Johnson stand in for the not-yet-announced Star Trek Stories.

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Somone on neogaf posted a color-corrected gif of what DOOM would look like if it used the original color palette:

 

u5yb.gif

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You know what that would make me infinitely more interested in Doom. I might even be legitimately anticipating it if it looked like that.

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I always thought this was a relatively interesting fact about Portal 2's strange development, so allow me to swoop in:

 

"Mel" actually comes from the Portal writers themselves, despite the low comic value - accounts vary, but Mel may have one time been the protagonist of Portal 2 (before it was changed back to Chell after negative reactions in playtesting). Numerous sources (here and "The Final Hours of Portal 2") also state that Portal 2's co-op originally featured "Chell and Mel" before they went with the robots... because not only are they so lovely, and expressive and *right*, but because we can accept them dying repeatedly and springing back to life :P

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Somone on neogaf posted a color-corrected gif of what DOOM would look like if it used the original color palette:

 

u5yb.gif

Dem shades of brown upon brown

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One thing I will say about Portal Stories: Mel is that while the voice acting and dialog isn't really up to the high standard of the Portal games, the sound design definitely is. They did a great job using effects like reverb (i.e. you are probably not going to notice it unless you are paying attention to it), and in general it just feels incredibly polished. Very impressive mod effort.

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Somone on neogaf posted a color-corrected gif of what DOOM would look like if it used the original color palette:

 

u5yb.gif

 

Speaking of old video game controversies:

 

diablo-fan-06.jpg

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Lordy, it's too gray and brown, needs more color!!!

It's too colorful, needs more gray and brown!

Video gmars

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