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Chris

Idle Thumbs Progresscast #15

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Sean has played Civ 4, right? Because what he was describing of what he'd like sounded more like Civ 4 and possible Gods and Kings(I haven't played it, so I can't say for sure).

Also the sports game thing...

I don't play sports game with the exception of Madden back in the Xbox 1 days. I really got into it because it was just a fun game, the rule set of a football game really felt like a cool tactics game, just with a window dressing of something that doesn't really appeal to me.

It's one of the reasons I never played Monday Night Combat. It looks really fun, but the theme, fiction, and presentation of being a "sport" really just turned me off.

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Sean has played a bunch of Civ IV and definitely at least mentioned it in the episode. He's also recently been playing non-expansion Civ V.

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I must have missed that part, oops.

edit: Oh weird, I re-listened to the ealy part and I missed where he said something along the lines of "you can't do this in civ 5, like you could in civ 4"; but then the rest of the conversation was the comparison of it. When I originally heard it I thought he was talking about the things he wish it did, not what Civ 4 actually achieved, lol.

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Jumanji is a pretty interesting film. If you watch it with the relationship between fathers and sons and Peter Pan in mind, it's a fairly rich experience. Also the contrast between the chaotic stampedes and the almost Shining ​like movements of the camera in the big quiet empty sets is fun to see.

Also, I may of misheard, but I think Chris said you needed a mod to change your religion's name? You can already mess with it when its founded.

fpTYx.jpg

L8Dw7.jpg

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Jumanji is a pretty interesting film. If you watch it with the relationship between fathers and sons and Peter Pan in mind, it's a fairly rich experience. Also the contrast between the chaotic stampedes and the almost Shining ​like movements of the camera in the big quiet empty sets is fun to see.

Also, I may of misheard, but I think Chris said you needed a mod to change your religion's name? You can already mess with it when its founded.

fpTYx.jpg

L8Dw7.jpg

Oh okay, that's what I had originally thought. Cool!

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Typing "best gaming podcast" into Google is, in fact, the way I found out about Idle thumbs.

It pointed me to Gamers with Jobs. Later, Chris did a guest spot on GWJ, and that's how I found out about Idle Thumbs.

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Typing "best gaming podcast" into Google is, in fact, the way I found out about Idle thumbs.

It pointed me to Gamers with Jobs. Later, Chris did a guest spot on GWJ, and that's how I found out about Idle Thumbs.

Boxquote material this. Well, the first part.

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To me, Civ 4 will always be better version because of Leonard Nimoy and the theme of Baba Vetu. Those 2 elements added so much more to the atmosphere and mood of game that is irreplaceable and insurmountable.

No amount of enhancements to the gameplay from Civ 5 could convince me otherwise (although the hex grid came close), and the nagging thought that "something is missing" will always be there whenever I play Civ 5.

As for the simulation of sports, I remember playing EA's MLB games in the 90s and it would simulate a brawl if I pitched at the batter too many times. I remember purposely pitching at batters who had hit a home run on me in past innings, which would start a brawl and the dug outs are emptied. Imaginary rivalries between me and these teams will start, and I will make a note whenever I play them on my simulated schedule. MLB games now doesn't have this brawl feature anymore, which made me realize that old 90s sports Video games actually did sports simulation better than current ones.

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Kept thinking of Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" listening to the Civ V adventures:

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

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Finally was able to listen to this episode, I got distracted all the times I hit play. Turns out that playing the fishing mini-game in Breath of Fire 3 was the answer to being able to focus while vegging out! I guess I have something to say to each our hosts regarding this episode also.

Sean - Okay not necessarily top drawer feedback but it was really cool to hear that you and the little lady are able to sit together and play a game together in this fashion. I mean, what's essentially meant to be a single player experience. All the (few) women I've dated I've been able to do that with and ever since the first it's a weird "indulge in my hobby or no dice" requirement I have.

Jake - Good to hear a quick old-man moment when you questioned Sean's enjoyment of Killer Instinct. I think I had a similar moment and it was fairly recently (as in like a year or two ago). The only Sonic the Hedgehog games I'd played up to that point were the Sega Genesis ones (excluding Sonic CD). Everything else I'd only seen via videos, never even played in front of me. So I got Sonic Colors for the DS, which I was assured to be a great experience as my first Sonic game since the mid 90's. And I was pretty much lied to. I had such an unexplainable rage to that game, yelling about how Sonic wasn't actually about being fast all the time, and more of a platformer. I got loud on the net and declared all post-Genesis Sonic games to be shit because all I see is the change in what that series was about.

... Okay maybe it wasn't entirely similar. I guess the only similarity is bad first impressions of trends that stick. I wonder if Mortal Kombat's hardcore voice didn't set that one up for you though.

Chris - What you were saying about sports games, is it that the mechanics would otherwise be appealing to 'traditional gamers' (forgive the use of phrase, I don't know how else to describe, uh, people who post on video game forums) but the presentation layer is so thick that it gets in the way? I'm trying to distill the point, which may not be fair, but I also want to make sure I picked up on it right.

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It is interesting to me how sports games can depending on the crowd get a lot of disdain lumped on them, as if they are somehow less "pure." Although its the same stupid mentality that blindly will lump a game like Modern Warfare in to the "frat dude" gaming territory as if somehow its less of a game than any other shooter.

That said, I love sports. I like watching lots of sports. I'm obsessed with some of them. Play in fantasy leagues. But its not my thing. But some of them have some amazingly deep systems built in to them and they in my view are pushing the boundaries of out of game interaction. It sounds like a lot of the new EA sports line this year will have ways to manage your team/league from a browser or your phone. Not sure if this post has a real point, just that I like sports games and I think that it would be interesting as mentioned in the pod, if people with no interest in a particular sport just decided to pick up a game like NHL 13 and learn the game, its system, but also about the sport itself.

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<puts on his grumpy old man voice> Now I've said it before & I'll say it again, I think Championship Manager belongs firmly inside any 'top X' list of strategy games.

While Civ was the 1st game I ever bought for my Amiga, and Dune 2 was probably the game which wowed me more than any other at the time, but I sank more hours into Champ Man than any other game by a huge margin.

Now I'm aware Chris is more specifically talking about games like Madden or FIFA and with those games I'm sure as soggybagel says a certain part of that disdain comes from a weird sense of misplaced tribal rivalry that the gaming community seems to posses about them, in the same way that quite often self labelled 'hardcore gamers' seem to criticise casual games without having ever played them.

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<puts on his grumpy old man voice> Now I've said it before & I'll say it again, I think Championship Manager belongs firmly inside any 'top X' list of strategy games.

While Civ was the 1st game I ever bought for my Amiga, and Dune 2 was probably the game which wowed me more than any other at the time, but I sank more hours into Champ Man than any other game by a huge margin.

Now I'm aware Chris is more specifically talking about games like Madden or FIFA and with those games I'm sure as soggybagel says a certain part of that disdain comes from a weird sense of misplaced tribal rivalry that the gaming community seems to posses about them, in the same way that quite often self labelled 'hardcore gamers' seem to criticise casual games without having ever played them.

I was talking about all sports games. I wasn't passing judgment on any of them as games. I'm saying they tend to be considered in a different category to non-sports games, regardless of merits.

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Just listened to this while doing some yard work. Feel like I need to chip in that there is in fact a novelization of the film Jumanji, which I purchased at around age 7 from my Scholastic book order. Unfortunately, I no longer own this.

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I was talking about all sports games. I wasn't passing judgment on any of them as games. I'm saying they tend to be considered in a different category to non-sports games, regardless of merits.

Just to clear up any misunderstanding, I was basically agreeing with what you say here.

That people do tend to look as sports games differently

I remember listing to a podcast (not sure if it was 3MA or No High Scores) where Bill Abner talked about how one of the OOTP baseball series was aparantly in the top 10 games on metacritic, but was constantly getting criticised because it was a 'glorified spreadsheet'.

I think it's probably something that any 'Sim' has to deal with. That there's a implied limitation to the direction it's gameplay can take because it has to stay faithful to it's source material.

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To be clear I wasn't saying anyone around these parts was irrationally hating sports games. Just that as Codicier said, there exists these weird and stupid rivalries between supposed factions of gamers. Its all silly at the end of the day, but I'm the type of person who pretty much enjoys all games. But perhaps I'm a bit of a weirdo.

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I just now got to actually listening to the last few podcasts.

You dudes mentioned at some point how US is pro-active in its spreading of culture. I recently learned that the Marshal Plan contained a clause stipulating that countries receiving support must open their film markets to a certain percentage of US movies. And here I was thinking that we all spoke English because it was a simple language and stuff.

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Also: you may just make me try Civ again. I always get overwhelmed by trying to second-guess the systems and get destroyed by some belligerent AI in relatively uninteresting scenarios; I never considered it an option to just play the game as a casual simulation.

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