Idle Thumbs 274: A Good One

[Jake]

Idle Thumbs 274:

A Good One

"This has happened, look what you've done," the robot wrote. Chris sent Danielle to her death in deep space, but her estranged husband still comes to visit. "It's just garbage," the robot continued. Smirking, a besunglassed Nick Breckon catches a ride on a dolphin and breaks the surface in a graceful arc. "Video game & pop culture cast, hacking and robot-mongering awaits," the robot concluded, incorrectly. "It's a good one!"

Discussed: Abzu, RimWorld, Headlander

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[gritfish]

Of all the Australian words that get mashed overseas, Emu is perhaps the funniest to me.

 

Australians pronounce it "eem - you".

 

The pronounciation "Eee - moo" sounds like baby-talk to me and it gets me every single time because when I hear it, it's usually on a serious news report or something.

[Nappi]

After hearing the whacky shit that is going on in Nick's colony, I'm starting to think that maybe he too should stream RimWorld.

[SL128]

[Nappi]

:tup:

[robotslave]

Listening to The Thumbs totally not know the term "board" just made me yell and throw things and yell some more.

 

Yes, you hopeless idiots, it came from arcade games.  Which, early on, didn't have much variation between the map of one "level" and the next.  The game had a board.  You repeatedly cleared it.  When you cleared the board, you went on to the next board, which looked exactly the same but had slightly faster enemies and more of them.  And maybe a different color palette.

 

You idiots don't even know where to put your quarter to reserve the next game, do you.  God damnit.  This is your history, you little ingrates.  Your culture.

 

Now go to your rooms, all of you.  No, I don't want to hear it.  GO TO YOUR ROOM.  Which doesn't have a television in it.  And you're not allowed to play your video game, either.

[SL128]

I just did a Poetweet sonnet, and came across two great starting stanzas:

No comment needed.
The Jake squint lives!!
I'll make sure to have it recorded.
Just like 3D TV exclusives!

 

Acknowledge the silliness of caps:
Arguing for Hitman's episodicness.
Game is pretentious indie crap! /s
SteamIDs, and 'roll' them blindness

[lizzyinthesky]

Jonescommaicecream sure sounds like a cooooooool person.

The game itself suggested 'Jamestown' when naming the Cool Zone colony (RIP) but I did come up with the idea for 'Video Jamestown'

[Salacious Snake]

 

edit to add image more appropriate to the conversation:

 

[Senerio]

Hey Chris. Here's the commercial you were thinking of. It's the Playstation 9! Coming in 2078! With improved retinal scanning and a mind control system!

 

[Chris]

Hey Chris. Here's the commercial you were thinking of. It's the Playstation 9! Coming in 2078! With improved retinal scanning and a mind control system!

Oh weird! I could have sworn there was one in which a modern day kid was given one by a time traveler and it fried his brain.

[Nappi]

I really hope Sony will make every effort to stretch the console life-cycles so that PS9 is actually released no sooner than 2078. They have done horrible job so far.

[Dewar]

Well there never has to be a PS5 now that there are incremental upgrades, so I imagine the PS9 can be whenever they want it to be.

[Problem Machine]

The game
by Problem Machine

 

EverEnding DevBlog 179: Intense
A poster of a chimp smoking a blunt
To say something that makes sense
This crap ass phone doesn't count.

 

There is with proofreading involved
Narratives that create harassment
EverEnding DevBlog 124: Resolved
But I value clarity and intent.

 

All day and I'm still tired...
The GOOD thing I make in the future
To the boring place I'm bored.
Accidental follows: Bug or feature?
Things i do so I think I'm covered.

 

 

 

I generated another one but it wasn't very good except for the title: "Sub-Weapons Though"

[inmostlight]

I remember playing Majestic!  I really can't remember much about it, but I know that I definitely "played" it.  There really wasn't too much game there, just typing to some chat bots and occasionally getting phone calls/instant messages.

 

I think the disclaimer at the beginning of phone calls was an option that you could turn on or off; I seem to recall a bit of media panic because early on someone not playing the game answered a threatening phone call from Majestic that didn't have the disclaimer and freaked out.

[drsizzl]

I think the whole levels as boards nomenclature arose from the early arcade games that often had only a single background on which you played-- think donkey kong. i mean, i have 'beat the board' talk in my earliest Video game memories. it also might be an east coast thing. it made sense/ sounded right at the time, i mean, you play games on boards, right?

[Korax]

I'm about the same age as the Thumbs, and the first time I ever heard that use of "board" was when some people I knew used it to talk about Halo 3 multiplayer maps. It still sounds weird to me.

[mikemariano]

Now I wish Sean was on the cast, because as soon as you floated ideas like an Idle Thumbs version of Book It! and fake plastic Rock Band fax machines, he would have immediately tried to get you guys to make these real.  We'd be ordering fax machine peripherals on the Idle Thumbs store by the end of the month.

 

And you guys still know how to play the hits!

 

JAKE (53:38): "Listen to developers collude—discreetly."

 

ME: "Oh boy, they're gonna do an Evony joke!"

 

*Several seconds of silence.*

 

ME: "Here it comes!"

 

CHRIS: "Um, OK, so...so let's..."

 

ME:

 

NICK: "Collude with me, my lord."

 

ME: "YES!"

 

PEDANT CORNER: Nick, dolphins and manatees aren't fish.

[plasticflesh]

On the subject of "boards." What about those from a D&D background? My older brothers were into D&D, and so we had a few "modules" on the book shelves.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_modules

 

 

While I'm at it. I brought one of these module books to elementary school, in 1994 or so. The teacher found it and was outraged, threatening to throw it away. She never specified why she was so outraged by it. I still wonder if she thought it was pornography, or if she thought it was Satanic.

[elmuerte]

PEDANT CORNER: Nick, dolphins and manatees aren't fish.

 

Neither ware wales.

[Salacious Snake]

The game

by Problem Machine

Thanks for reminding me about this thing.

It hard

by J.D. Cohen

Another person altogether before

(sorry too on the nose)

Photo: GET IT MORE!

She is. With her stinky caboose

By Teenage Engineering. It's neat!

Was so good in the hateful eight

Ok that ID@XBOX reel was great

This was supposed to be a big fight

Some shoes for these rock trolls

Fluidic space

Steve gaynor ate my balls

I was staring death in the face.

My dog's butt seriously smells

[Problem Machine]

Amazing. This is like the main thing that makes me want to tweet more, since like 50% of my tweets are just automated announcements for blog posts it kinda fucks up the flow.

[aquason]

Were oblivious

by Nick Breckon

 

Tweet this tweet like a week ago

Does she lean on your arm

And I ain't in Chicago!

I also miss Pepperidge Farm. :/

 

Congrats!

Good to hear. Same re: others.

Definitely the guy narrating strats

Pan w/ sausage and peppers

 

From inside the CNN Turk office:

It then another historical setting.

Nice

is a totally weird/bonkers thing

Determined to kill that device

[WickedCestus]

It always takes a couple of tries, but there's some gold to be found in Poetweets. Although it seems like the algorithm is definitely skewed towards more recent tweets - dunno if that's intentional or not.

Will hunting

by WickedCestus

In all matters big and small

Noise! seriously, you are a fridge

Something was any help to me at all

Throw me around a bridge

I Will eat tsukemen again

As gm. I know a guy. he's real good

Power wash my brain

I forgot they are my favourite food

And we are merely in a dumpster

Robots trying to predict the future

Which do you think is better?

No no no no no. actually I'm unsure

Will appreciate you much much later

[McDoom]

I think it was Chris who mentioned a few hours being the time that somebody can pay attention to a game and maybe that's why movies are as long as they are. As a person who would prefer to play games that don't outstay their welcome, I think there is something to this observation, especially in the current climate of open world bonanzas. Although I don't think it's a hard cap like 122 minutes. Human attention spans have become notoriously short, and if you think someone is going to give you two hours of their time for your art project, then you may be living in a Utopian fantasy. (I don't mean for art project to sound derogatory, but we're talking about fictional make-em-ups that are asking people for time and money.) I think the real problem is pacing.

 

I hear the term gameplay loop get tossed around a lot on these podcasts, but rarely the term narrative loop. These open world games with story driving "main missions" and then 10 times as many side quests are just begging to be broken in a narrative sense. Yet games have trained us to look in every corner and read every note/audio log/blood graffiti. If I can invoke FarCry 2 here, I think one of the reasons it works so well, is that there isn't a lot of optional detritus that pulls you away from the main thread. Sure, you can go after all the diamonds, but there's no cutscene reward where the Jackal thanks you and weeps. "I thought I'd lost all my preciouses." You don't even clear (read: check off) the outposts, they are just part of a larger adventure.

 

Anyway, I think the player, viewer, reader needs a kickstart to their attention span more like every 7 minutes. Even Moby Dick is broken up into fairly brief chapters, and that is a sprawling mess of a novel, but it has been assembled carefully into a flowing narrative. Imagine if GTA V was the story of 3 criminals who do heists, retire, and then read 100 pages about cetacean phylogenetics.

 

TLDR: I'm old and don't have time for all your mini-games, but I am intrigued by a few side quests that round out your larger world.