Jake

Idle Thumbs 245: Psyching Out That Bear

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I've always called the SNES the "Super Nintendo," but I'm totally up for saying "ess-ness" from now on.

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Today's episode made me too terrified to ever contemplate building a PC.

 

Like other's said, don't worry too much. I built a PC last month and it was super easy. The most stressful part was picking the components - actually putting everything together was fairly painless.

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Finally getting around to listen to this episode, and I have a few comments which haven't been made yet.

 

Firstly, on the "playing Just Cause/Bioshock etc like a boring FPS makes it boring" topic, I think my problem with games like this is that I never seem to have enough "special cool stuff juice" to use my cool stuff as much as I'd like to. Certainly, I remember basically having huge ADAM issues in Bioshock and running out quite a lot, which meant I had to go back to playing boring FPS with shooting. If you're going to provide people with limited amounts of "do cool stuff" resource, then you should probably make it so that not-doing-cool-stuff is also basically bearable. 

 

Secondly, riffing off of the "people calling the SNES the snez, snes etc", I think it's definitely a Britishism, but possibly fed in from the fact that Nintendo was never as big a thing in the UK (or several other bits of Europe) in the 80s. (We were all either Sega or Amiga/ST/other-things-which-didn't-take-off-in-the-USA.) As a result, the SNES was the first thing from Nintendo that UK people might actually care about, and we had no real reference for it being a sequel to a thing called a NES. I think that might have encouraged us to compress the name all as one thing.

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Those letters about bridge and specifically the comment about euchre reminded me of the similar "tricks" based card game I would always play with my cousins in Wisconsin: Sheepshead.

 

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepshead_%28game%29 : "(Sheepshead) is the Americanized version of a card game that originated in Central Europe in the late 18th century under the German name Schafkopf. Although Schafkopf literally means "sheepshead," it has nothing to do with sheep; the term probably was derived and translated incorrectly from Middle High German and referred to playing cards on a barrel head (from kopf, meaning head, and Schaff, meaning a barrel)."

 

When playing with family, giving "tells" to people were almost unavoidable since we knew each other so well. The real trick was doing a "tell" that was undetectable, which is probably the meta for all the games of this type (sheepshead, euchre, hearts, bridge).

 

My most vivid memory of playing this game with my brothers, cousins, and uncle was an unfortunate nickname given to me as a result of my play style. After the cards are passed out, there is a number of cards put in the center of the table known as "the blind". Each person, starting with the person to the right of the dealer has a chance to "pick" the blind, and then they have to win a certain number of high-value tricks in that round of play; if they cannot, they lose a large number of (play session) points. When I was just learning how to play I would play very conservatively, "passing" the blind even when I had a relatively strong hand. Passing on a strong hand was called a "Mauer" and is generally frowned upon as it's unoptimal play and you can end up spoiling the game for someone who picks later on. I ended up doing this often enough (unconsciously) that I was given the title "The Tower of Mauer." (it rhymes).

 

[if no one picks the blind, the game becomes a "Leaster" which effectively punishes anyone who "Mauers".]

 

Thanks again for the podcast and the memories guys!

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Finally getting around to listen to this episode, and I have a few comments which haven't been made yet.

 

Firstly, on the "playing Just Cause/Bioshock etc like a boring FPS makes it boring" topic, I think my problem with games like this is that I never seem to have enough "special cool stuff juice" to use my cool stuff as much as I'd like to. Certainly, I remember basically having huge ADAM issues in Bioshock and running out quite a lot, which meant I had to go back to playing boring FPS with shooting. If you're going to provide people with limited amounts of "do cool stuff" resource, then you should probably make it so that not-doing-cool-stuff is also basically bearable. 

 

Secondly, riffing off of the "people calling the SNES the snez, snes etc", I think it's definitely a Britishism, but possibly fed in from the fact that Nintendo was never as big a thing in the UK (or several other bits of Europe) in the 80s. (We were all either Sega or Amiga/ST/other-things-which-didn't-take-off-in-the-USA.) As a result, the SNES was the first thing from Nintendo that UK people might actually care about, and we had no real reference for it being a sequel to a thing called a NES. I think that might have encouraged us to compress the name all as one thing.

 

 

This reminds me-

 

I was listening to a British gaming podcast, and I learned the mind boggling fact that apparently people in the UK call Resident Evil REZZY. Rezzy 1, Rezzy 6, etc.

 

I don't even have a particular fondness for Resident Evil but I had a distinct THING when I heard that. It was very unpleasant and I did not like it at all. I'm going to have to ask anyone in the UK using this particular language to reevaluate for my sanity, please.

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Going back to old Final Fantasies, and when i try to replay Chrono Trigger, I feel like the core gameplay is still interesting but the density of it is just extremely thin. Like, I never have to grind in most of those games -- except final fantasy 5, which is why I don't think 5 is a very good final fantasy -- but I think the actual tactical combat decisions are interesting and putting together the equipment and materia/relic/sphere grid whatever loadouts for the characters is fun. It's just that it takes so damn long to progress the game, and there's so much fluff in between the decision making. This isn't specifically a JRPG problem, I tend to get frustrated by this a lot trying to play western RPGs too. I replayed the first two Fallouts recently and it's fine for the first one but Fallout 2 is such a time hog.

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