Idle Thumbs 299.5: Reader Mail Spectacular

[Chris]

Idle Thumbs 299.5:

Reader Mail Spectacular
Your burning questions were so white hot they melted through the mailbag, through the table, and through two stories of floor and ceiling. Join us three floors below the earth in the Idle Thumbs underground bunker (now with mail-shaped skylight) as we get down and dirty with what's left of your letters.

Discussed: Donkey Kong Jr., Solar Jetman, Super Metroid Rotation, Dwarf Fortress, Skyrim, Dr. Mario, Doctor Mario (D. Cronenberg, 1992), League of Legends, Freecell, Animal Crossing

 

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[RubixsQube]

Should we make threads about Important If True here...or will there be another entire forum section for it?

 

 

[Chris]

Here!

 

 

[Patrick R]

David Cronenberg's Dr. Mario is one of my favorite things that's happened on the podcast in a bit. I don't think it's happened in a while, but I hope whoever was doing those Idle Thumbs animations takes that on.

[mondryle]

Ah, to be a long-time listener. The weekly podcast is ending but the last two episodes have given us the coinage of "bagblast", Chris' Bagblast Enthusiast persona, and content from the vault. It is bittersweet indeed.

[Patrick R]

23 minutes ago, mondryle said:

Ah, to be a long-time listener. The weekly podcast is ending but the last two episodes have given us the coinage of "bagblast", Chris' Bagblast Enthusiast persona, and content from the vault. It is bittersweet indeed.

 

I forgot to mention this! As someone who's listened to every episode from #1 to #150 about 4 times each, any time I hear something new from that era it's like magic. I can't wait for the Progress Casts to be released.

[Problem Machine]

Regarding arbitrary rules kids make up for games, this is actually secretly super common among Dark Souls players. Everyone seems to have their one right way to play the game. No magic, no ranged attacks, no 'cheesy' weapons, all parrying, no parrying, etcetera. Some of these are explicit challenges set out by the player to themselves, but just as many are unchallenged assumptions about the best or most interesting way to play. I very intentionally play in the way which I believe is most interesting and fun to me, but everyone has their own idea of what the game is, which is very often a pared down subsection of the actual gameplay space. Often players end up stuck on challenges, not because they're categorically incapable of completing them, but because their presumptions about how the game is played don't allow them to try varied approaches that would allow them to complete the challenge more easily. The same is true of other games to varying degrees, but it's especially visible with the Souls games.

 

Also, in addition to the Don't Give Up, Skeleton there's the Listen Carefully, Skeleton

[Cbirdsong]

Jake's 3D glasses trick was done during the 3D TV push, without red/blue part. A small number of PS3 games supported two views/players on one screen using two sets of polarized 3D glasses on a special Playstation-branded 3D TV, and some TV manufacturers had similar set-specific implementations that just stretched the hell out of the image but obviously couldn't account for menus or cutscenes, which totally broke the experience.

[Badfinger]

Rather than getting yourselves down by thinking you haven't played enough video games to fill a podcast I implore you to let readers play the games and just let your brains fill the gaps, because they do so in a spectacular fashion.

 

Keep bag blasting forever, it's so good.

[SuperBiasedMan]

1 hour ago, Problem Machine said:

Regarding arbitrary rules kids make up for games, this is actually secretly super common among Dark Souls players. Everyone seems to have their one right way to play the game. No magic, no ranged attacks, no 'cheesy' weapons, all parrying, no parrying, etcetera. Some of these are explicit challenges set out by the player to themselves, but just as many are unchallenged assumptions about the best or most interesting way to play. I very intentionally play in the way which I believe is most interesting and fun to me, but everyone has their own idea of what the game is, which is very often a pared down subsection of the actual gameplay space. Often players end up stuck on challenges, not because they're categorically incapable of completing them, but because their presumptions about how the game is played don't allow them to try varied approaches that would allow them to complete the challenge more easily. The same is true of other games to varying degrees, but it's especially visible with the Souls games.

 

I was going to post that I've started doing the same as of last week.

I had a hankering for Dark Souls after many hours of Nick. I've only finished the game once but I'm still not one for replaying games that much normally, so I made up some rules to challenge myself to try different parts of Dark Souls and get more out of it. I have 32 different potential limitations and I randomly pick one to put upon myself each time I beat a boss. I also randomly roll which stat to level up when doing so. It's been fun and weird. I had to play with no estus (the healing item) last week and it killed me. Then just the other day I got "Kill every NPC I meet" and after a really good fight with a blacksmith that had amazing wrestling moves I got crushed by our old friend Siegmeyer (the onion knight who says "Hmmm" a lot).

[Spenny]

I haven't played it, but some devs in this city made a game that uses Jake's 3D glasses idea: https://xmgstudio.itch.io/madness-at-monster-manor-2d

[ajr82]

Your whole discussion of David Cronenberg's Dr. Mario just had me thinking about the movie Cronenberg released right after The Fly: Dead Ringers.  This movie is about a pair of co-dependant brothers who are both also doctors.  They assume each others' roles and pose as each other (Player 1 and Player 2, perhaps?) and descend into madness, mutilation and a disturbing collection of painful-looking gynecological instruments.  Basically what I'm saying is that David Cronenberg almost definitely had predicted the game Dr. Mario and the future direction of the Mario franchise in 1988.

[SecretAsianMan]

The Super Metroid Rotation speedrun from AGDQ was good.  It's really interesting to see how a nominal alteration to the game completely changes things.  In a normal SM speedrun, one of the key items is the speedbooster which not only allows for faster horizontal movement but can also be used to sequence break.  In Rotation, the horizontal corridors are now vertical shafts and vice versa, so the key item now becomes the high jump boots (and later the space jump).  Areas that were trivial before are now a challenge and difficult sections become simple.  I found it quite fascinating.

 

 

 

[cueball]

I, for one, insist that these are called Bag Blasts forever.

[Atlantic]

Thanks for blasting our collective bags, chaps.

[iax]

Seems there's a bunch of games implementing the colored/polarized glasses multiplayer idea, Dimension Brothers is another one http://dimensionbrothers.circusatos.com/

[feelthedarkness]

Self Imposed Rules:

 

In college the hallway crew got REALLY into super street fighter 2, and one of my pals had the most irritating style (which he applied to all fighting games). He was aggressively, maniacally persistent in trying to execute a strategy that he "knew" would be impossible to counter if he could ever just pull it off effectively. In SSF2 it was Ryu fireball turtling, but he could never nail the uppercuts so, it was just a dogged persistence to silliness. I said I was going to follow the same path and beat him 100 times in a row using only light punch with yellow dress Chun-Li. The jump version had a nice downward angle so it made it easier to fluster the botched uppercut. I had to tape up a whiteboard to track the progress. 

[mikemariano]

The Cronenberg-directed Dr. Mario movie pitch was excellent!  However, because Dr. Luigi now exists you could draw an easier line and have the Mario Bros. remake Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons as the duo.

 

Towards the end of the original film, Irons's characters alternate their despair-fueled drug binges.  This is similar to the asynchronous multiplayer of the original Super Mario Bros. games—only one brother at a time goes out in search of mushrooms.

[noiseredux]

On 2/9/2017 at 4:00 PM, Badfinger said:

Rather than getting yourselves down by thinking you haven't played enough video games to fill a podcast I implore you to let readers play the games and just let your brains fill the gaps, because they do so in a spectacular fashion.

 

Keep bag blasting forever, it's so good.

 

seriously. I'd love a weekly/biweekly/monthly show that's just a Bagblast about games. Meaning, you guys don't have to play games to be prepared. Just let us write in questions/comments about games to give you guys something to talk about. Food for thought? No pressure!

[Badfinger]

Self Imposed Rule:

 

Playing dorm room madden, I picked teams at random and wouldn't pick a new team until I lost. Senior year I ended up with one team in November that I played for the rest of the year. Less my skill than the team itself and the available player pool of opponents, who got to know each other inside and out.

[thefncrow]

On self-imposed rules:

 

I like to play FIFA, and will play against friends here.  FIFA is a game with a million teams that you won't really ever use unless you force yourself to.  So, we devised a rule.

 

No one ever chooses their own team outright.  Instead, you go to the top level selector, count down from 3, and both sides hit random.  You get 5 random rolls in total.  Both players decide before any more rolls are taken, but you live with your decision.  .  If you get a mid-level team on pick #2 and decide that you're OK sitting with them, you can't suddenly take your 3 remaining rolls if your opponent lands on an all star team with their next pick.  Similarly, if you leave that weird mid-level team you got early on and then got bad random rolls on every successive try, you can't go back and take that old team.

 

This means you're normally playing with players you have never heard of, and with teams whose strengths and weaknesses you're totally unaware of.  You have to look at your roster, quickly look at some attributes, and try to figure out how to best play this team.  And you might have to do that while being massively outgunned because your opponent happened to roll Barcelona on their first try and you ran every roll you had in hopes of finding someone at a similar talent level and got stuck with the 7th place team from the Korean K-League because that's what you got on the last roll.

[Beasteh]

On 09/02/2017 at 9:00 PM, Badfinger said:

Rather than getting yourselves down by thinking you haven't played enough video games to fill a podcast I implore you to let readers play the games and just let your brains fill the gaps, because they do so in a spectacular fashion.

 

Keep bag blasting forever, it's so good.

On 13/02/2017 at 4:27 PM, noiseredux said:

 

seriously. I'd love a weekly/biweekly/monthly show that's just a Bagblast about games. Meaning, you guys don't have to play games to be prepared. Just let us write in questions/comments about games to give you guys something to talk about. Food for thought? No pressure!

 

Just wanted to agree with the posts above from Badfinger and noiseredux. These reader mail podcasts are great! There's less pressure for you to play games each week but you still get to talk about them, and we get to enjoy hearing you going off on weird tangents.

 

On Self-imposed rules: it seems to be almost universal that all Goldeneye 64 matches stipulate NO ODDJOB. I wonder if any other rules have become so widespread?

 

[feelthedarkness]

we had a kind of house rule to play exclusively on 1 shot kills, pistols only, no oddjob. it felt more "gentleman superspy"

[Ben X]

A game where "Mario goes missing, then he comes back and perhaps is misshapen": Le Retour de Mario Guerre.

 

And if Cronenberg is tied to Goldblum for Luigi, perhaps he could cast Scanners villain Michael Ironside as Mario?