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Idle Weekend January 1, 2016: The Finest of the Year

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Idle Weekend January 1, 2016:

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The Finest of the Year

Weekenders Danielle and Rob have had a hell of a 2015, and they want to tell you all about it. Well, mostly they want to tell you about the games they loved best in the (old) year. Plus, some of their favorite game music of 2015, and tales of unusual video game improvisation!

Discussed: Sunless Sea, Invisible Inc., Rocket League, Dropsy, SOMA, The Witcher 3, Life is Strange, Dying Light, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Bloodborne, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Archer

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I just got around to starting in on Dropsy with the Winter Steam Sale and it is SO GOOD. I completely know what Rob meant about the art style being off-putting at first, but I really think that isn't because of an intrinsic property of the style itself so much as the kinds of things similar styles have been associated with. It works incredibly well both because of and despite that association: Despite of it, in that the cartoony style seems to evoke how Dropsy himself sees the world, simplified but beautiful, and because of it in that, as Rob says, the reaction of a lot of audiences tends to echo the thematic content, expecting something crass and creepy and finding something incredibly heartfelt and earnest.

 

The Hug is amazing as a game design mechanic. It simultaneously rewards you for helping someone and subtly indicates to the player that the interactions with that character have reached an end and they can focus elsewhere for puzzle solving. The actual animations for the hugs are incredible, each NPC has their own reaction of embarrassment or friendliness that makes it feel all the more like you've helped an actual person.

 

Though it took me a while to actually get to buying the game for money reasons, the trailer totally sold me on it:

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I'm not 100% sure I'm remembering this from this podcast and not one of the others I was listening to today, but I feel like Green Man Gaming is kind of a weird choice to discuss as your exemplar of grey market key sites. GMG has had one or two controversies about the possible provenance of keys but they are definitely authorized resellers of keys from at least some major publishers, like WB. The sort of key sites in question are more like G2A or Cdkeys.com, which make no secret about sourcing their keys from third parties (you might get the key as a photo of the key from packaging, for example) and tend to be sold out of a lot of older stuff because they don't have an ongoing source of new keys and nobody cares enough to resell them stuff that's not hot anymore.

 

Also, I've found that waiting a few weeks or even a couple months after the release of a game is rarely enough to get a discount worth the trouble and there are often better deals during the preorder phase. I think the idea that Steam has trained us to wait on sales has some validity to it and could potentially be a problem to a degree, but I don't think the issue is that you can save a few bucks by buying it a few months later, but rather the notion that if you're not going to play it right away it will nearly always be cheaper down the road. And in this age of backlogs in the hundreds or thousands of games, there's rarely any rush unless you're determined to be part of the conversation that springs up in the immediate wake of a release. Which is usually my reason for getting in on a brand new game.

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I remember when Dropsy was just a thread on Something Awful, and here it is on a GOTY list! They grow up so fast. ;___;

 

Re: game music, my favorite game music of the year was definitely the OST of Undertale-- which makes sense, since my first exposure to Toby Fox's work was the music he did for Homestuck.

 

The Undertale soundtrack simultaneously fit with the retro-JRPGish look of the game but also conveyed a lot of narrative meaning through the use of leitmotifs, recurring themes, remixes, etc. And in a game that puts so much emphasis on the relationships between its characters and the player, it makes a sense that the player is also able to track the relationships between the songs on the soundtrack.

 

Plus it had a bunch of extremely cool boss fight songs, and cool songs are the most important part of any boss fight.

 

I also really liked the music for this year's Final Fantasy XIV expansion, so maybe cool boss fight songs are the secret calculus through which all video game music can be judged.

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Danielle, this might be an obvious question, but considering that you found something enjoyable in Prometheus just because it was sci-fi that asked questions about the nature of reality and the place of human consciousness within it... how much anime have you seen? Twig will groan, but have you seen any of Neon Genesis Evangelion?

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Danielle, this might be an obvious question, but considering that you found something enjoyable in Prometheus just because it was sci-fi that asked questions about the nature of reality and the place of human consciousness within it... how much anime have you seen? Twig will groan, but have you seen any of Neon Genesis Evangelion?

 

I would be very very interested in Neon Genesis Eva Thumbs Watch.

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Are Danielle's Life is Strange streams she mentioned archived anywhere?

 

I only see an archive for

 and
.

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Souls talk!  

Weirdly enough, one of the elements that attracts me to the Souls games is not just their difficulty, but also to play dress up with dolls and show them off to people.  It's like Dark Fantasy Barbie.  Commonly referred to as the game of Fashion Souls.  Since playing with others (either co-op or vs) is core to the experience, it's fun to do that in style.  So on repeat playthroughs, they became about designing perfect character designs through a combination of face/body, clothes and weapon selection.  And the 3 actual Souls games gave increasingly better tool sets to do that, culminating in Dark Souls 2, which has so many options.  This was a reason that Bloodborne was a bit disappointing to myself and others, the weapon and outfit variety was much more pared back, so most characters just kind of looked the samey.  You couldn't end up with a three way pitched battle between Sauroman, a peasant farmer and Robin Hood.  Indiana Jones coudln't face off against Muhammad Ali.  

Also, I enjoy how rewarding those games are to explore the environment, which I feel has a relationship to their both their difficulty and how everything is hand crafted.  Take a Skyrim, which has a majesty and scale that the Souls games might not, but 20 caves in, you've seen 20 variations on cave and if you were to somehow figure out a way to get killed, you wouldn't be excited about taking another shot at the 20th cave to see if there was a path you'd overlooked.  The difficulty in the Souls games encourages patience, a slower pace, and re-exploration.

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Regarding archer vice, correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression they didn't want to use ISIS because of the actual ISIS becoming a thing.

 

 

I would be very very interested in Neon Genesis Eva Thumbs Watch.

 

I am all up for an EVA Keyframes. Maybe just the rebuild films?

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Twig will groan, but have you seen any of Neon Genesis Evangelion?

 

Evangelion isn't an anime I'd typically suggest for people completely new to the format, but it would certainly make for an interesting talking point. Though I'd be just as up for a Thumbs watch of Brazil, for many of the same reasons (contention about the ending, for example). Or perhaps I'm just shilling for Brazil. Which I wouldn't feel guilty about at all. Brazil is fantastic.

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Evangelion isn't an anime I'd typically suggest for people completely new to the format, but it would certainly make for an interesting talking point. Though I'd be just as up for a Thumbs watch of Brazil, for many of the same reasons (contention about the ending, for example). Or perhaps I'm just shilling for Brazil. Which I wouldn't feel guilty about at all. Brazil is fantastic.

Oh, I agree, but Danielle was talking about flawed but deeply psychological and existential sci-fi. If I could recommend her any anime, it'd be Revolutionary Girl Utena, which seems to be an even stronger cocktail of things that she's said to like, but none of them have been the topic of discussion in the podcast... yet.

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Oh right. Then Evangelion certainly fits. I feel like there should be a thread for this though. It would be easy to rattle off a bunch of examples that are thematically appropriate.

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