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Idle Thumbs 262: Dead Letters

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Idle Thumbs 262:

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Dead Letters

Before Chris disappears deep into Russia on assignment, we check all our dead drops for incoming correspondence with readers abroad, and find some gems, long forgotten and wedged way in the back. Enjoy tales of babywalling your identical twin, of vile things left in jars, of theme parks gone wrong, and of the time Nick Breckon played Dark Souls 3 alone with nothing but a bottle of rum.

Discussed: Dark Souls 3, HTC Vive, Parkitect, Planet Coaster, American McGee Presents: Tim Burton's Willy Wonka Tycoon

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Re: the lost Metroidvania freeware,

 
Initially I thought they were talking about Iji, which I have played and like a whole lot (http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php), but that one is maybe too combat oriented to be what they're talking about. More "escape from captors" than "figure out what happened".
 
Based on the "girl wakes up from stasis and tries to figure out what's going on" description, I tracked down a Youtube playthrough of Holdover (
), which seems to match that pretty well.

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The Chocolate Factory simulator where you're killing children for their flavour of the seven deadly sins and trying to bequeath your factory to a perfect child just sounds like a smaller scale Crusader Kings 2.

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I never realized I needed a Chocolate Factory simulator until you guys mentioned it. 

 

I would love a American McGee presents Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl: The game simulator 2K16.

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RE: Dragon Age: Inquisition and why people would want to play it...

 

It actually has characters and a story.

 

 

Music at 48s

 

 

(I just wanted to post sick dunks)

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Barkley Shut up and Jam: Gaiden is still the best use of the Quad City DJs.  It's cannonical.

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not sure if this is the game that reader was looking for, but i'm almost positive that the Steve-recommended game Chris mentioned was Saira. the premise of the game is that you're a young woman looking for an explanation as to why every human has seem to have disappeared after you teleported to Mars. it's a 2D game in the style that's not quite a Metroid-like, but does have the same joy of exploring spaces.

 

the dev- Nifflas- also made Knytt, which is a 2D platformer about a stranded alien looking for replacement parts for their ship. it feels like a more boiled down version of Saira, but it's one of my favorite games and is worth checking out if the reader enjoyed Saira.

 

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not sure if this is the game that reader was looking for, but i'm almost positive that the Steve-recommended game Chris mentioned was Saira.

Yes! I think you're right. This is the game I was trying to think of.

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Re: the lost Metroidvania freeware,

 
Initially I thought they were talking about Iji, which I have played and like a whole lot (http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php), but that one is maybe too combat oriented to be what they're talking about. More "escape from captors" than "figure out what happened".
 
Based on the "girl wakes up from stasis and tries to figure out what's going on" description, I tracked down a Youtube playthrough of Holdover (
), which seems to match that pretty well.

 

Heya, that's totally the game I was looking for! I've been bugging my friend by looking for this thing for a while now. He's gonna be so glad that I won't be bothering him anymore with talk of my exploration. 

 

You've done a great service to me!

Cheers!

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Heya, that's totally the game I was looking for! I've been bugging my friend by looking for this thing for a while now. He's gonna be so glad that I won't be bothering him anymore with talk of my exploration. 

 

You've done a great service to me!

Cheers!

 

Sweet! Happy to have helped. :)

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It is my contention that all musical endeavors are the result of people attempting to write "Creep" or "Space Jam", and that Creep was an attempt to write Space Jam.

 

These are the pure alchemical concepts of music. Plato's Form Of The Good, if you will.

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Goddammit, you guys read my reader mail... sorry about that.

 

That dog got into a lot of trouble. Eating shit, escaping from the house and making us lure him back with lunch meat and laser pointers, and bringing a decomposing gerbil into the house after I made it's grave way too shallow. Unfortunately he was hit by a car a few years later and his brother accidentally hung himself.

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Nick's experiences with the HTC Vive made me wonder how developers are going to solve the lingering problem of 'what happens if I put my head through this thing?' Like: if I'm in an empty actual room with a virtual table in the middle of it, what happens if I kneel down and put my head where the table should be? Or even in a VR adaptation of an existing driving game, or FPS; what happens if I want to put my head through the dashboard, or through a solid door? Does the player's vision just start clipping madly through the world, or what? I can't seem to picture a graceful way to handle this...

 

Also, it might be just me but the horrifying doppelganger/babywalling story seemed extremely reminiscent of the house endlessly on fire in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

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The Climb just darkens the entire screen when you've put your head inside of something.

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The Climb just darkens the entire screen when you've put your head inside of something.

 

I want a VR experience where I'm explicitly just a ghost that can move through walls and peek into other areas.

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I want a VR experience where I'm explicitly just a ghost that can move through walls and peek into other areas.

 

Designing around 3d limitations would be interesting. I can't remember if this is a real project, a putative project, or something hypothetical that was mentioned on this very podcast, but I seem to remember a game where sticking your head into normal level geometry would show a crazy hellscape.

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