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Jake

Saturday Morning Streams

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Maybe at one point these will be worth their own thread, but for now here are all the Saturday Streams (and a couple other one-off videos) that we've done.

For those who haven't noticed (because they're super irregular and infrequent), we've been streaming games on Saturday mornings on twitch.tv. Some of them are old games from when we were kids, some are just games we love, and some are games none of us have played before and wanted to discover them live and shamefully in front of an audience. Also some of them have special guests!

Note that because these are recordings of live streams, they often have pre-roll, and sometimes glitch out weirdly, but hopefully you'll find some entertainment and illumination among the chaos. Enjoy...

Pikmin 2 Head-to-Head

Most people probably didn't know that Shigero Miyamoto's team made a competitive RTS game, and fewer know that it's super good. Jake and Chris play a couple hours of Pikmin 2's relatively unknown, but surprisingly robust split-screen versus mode.

BioShock 2: Minerva's Den with Steve Gaynor

Idle Thumb's very own Steve "Hot Scoops" Gaynor was also the lead designer and writer on the BioShock 2 DLC "Minerva's Den." When in town for the weekend we played through the entirety of Minerva's Den with Steve at the wheel providing a realtime director's commentary on the game.

Tennnes

Tennnes is a simple-but-deep same-screen competitive tennis game, a throw back to '80s sports games, with the mechanical fidelity modern game design allows. We took a break in the middle of an Idle Thumbs episode to play a bunch of it. Enjoy!

X-Com with JP LeBreton and Evan Lahti

The original X-Com has a notoriously steep barrier to entry, but PC Gamer's Evan Lahti and Double Fine designer JP LeBreton help guide us (and you!) into the game in a way that we've heard actually works.

DayZ with Evan Lahti

Sean and Chris are guided through the brutal world of DayZ with the help of PC Gamer's resident DayZ expert and evangelist Evan Lahti. Watch Sean find a bicycle and go for a lovely ride through the apocalyptic wastelands, realize it was all a dream and fear for his life.

FTL: Faster Than Light

After many ill-fated attempts at managing his ship's crew's journey through some particularly vengeful patches of space, Chris plays through his first ever successful FTL campaign live, with lots of incredible back and forth from the audience.

Minecraft

For a while, Idle Thumbs ran a Minecraft server. It's currently closed, but take a trip through the Thumbs server that was, with us and all the other Thumbs who logged in for the stream.

BioShock with JP LeBreton

Frequent Idle Thumbs guest and game designer JP LeBreton worked on the original BioShock, and takes us through some of the game, including his level, Arcadia.

As a bonus, JP brought in and played "Arcadia Demade," a Doom II remake of his own BioShock level, re-creating Arcadia's spaces and encounters as faithfully as possible using only stock Doom assets. Worth watching for the Houdini Splicer encounter alone.

Super Black Bass

A bass fishing sim for the SNES, Super Black Bass was one of those games from your childhood that you played a lot even though you knew you were only understanding half of what was going on. Sean shows Jake and Chris how it's done.

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It was very weird watching Pikmin and apparently being in my own private chat room for about an hour.

I can say that watching streams (and subsequent discussion on a cast) of DayZ sold me a copy of ArmA 2, and the stream of FTL sold my a copy of FTL. The greatest viral marketing scheme in history.

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Hansel and Gretel - Witch Hunters supports Idle Thumbs now.

KHsA5Rn.png

And the Tennnes stream is hilarious!

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I loved the Pikmin 2 stream, except for all the parts where Chris was losing because he was worried about the chat. True to his .gif persona, Jake didn't give as much of a fuck, though he is seriously the best (fake) sore loser ever. The moment things don't go his way, everything's for stupid babies.

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The Pikmin 2 stream was amazing, but it's really weird to think that apparently Chris and Jake have never played the actual campaign of Pikmin 2 and thus never developed certain habits. ie: neither of them ever dismissed their Pikmin or used the quick base return.

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The Pikmin 2 stream was amazing, but it's really weird to think that apparently Chris and Jake have never played the actual campaign of Pikmin 2 and thus never developed certain habits. ie: neither of them ever dismissed their Pikmin or used the quick base return.

I don't know about Jake, but I played a fair amount of it, just not since 2004. It's true that it's such a minor amount of time relative to how much time I've spent with MP that any SP-derived habits were likely subsumed many years ago.

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I forget which stream featured

as pre-show music, but I can't think of these streams without immediately going to YouTube to play the song again.

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But hey, I didn't know you could shake the opposing player's Pikmin off your guy. How do you do that, with the c-stick?

Just by running around in circles with the regular movement stick.

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Bugs and server issues aside, I was very impressed by the new Sim City in yesterday's stream.

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I don't know what quick base return is. Shit.

 

Dismiss your Pikmin with X, then press and hold X to have up to three Pikmin nearby automatically carry you back to your base faster than your spaceman can move on his own. It needs to be unlocked in the main game, but I'm almost positive it's there from the start in multiplayer.

It opens up the narrative can of worms that you activate it by pretending to be dead, and the Pikmin are presumably trying to harvest you to produce more Pikmin the way they do with other corpses.

 

Oh, that reminds me: that one Breadbug that took a heavy amount of damage and you weren't sure how? Breadbugs are too big to be made into Pikmin, so whenever a Breadbug moves into your Ship or Onion's tractor beam,  it just gets pulled up and bumps its head. The most effective way to damage them is to deliberately bait them with corpses or treasure, then have your Pikmin grab the same item and forcefully drag both the item and the Breadbug back to the ship.

 

 

 

 

So the Sim City stream made me really wary of getting the game. I was really excited for it, but it seemed to be have major problems.

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It opens up the narrative can of worms that you activate it by pretending to be dead, and the Pikmin are presumably trying to harvest you to produce more Pikmin the way they do with other corpses.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

 

*gasp*

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

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Dismiss your Pikmin with X, then press and hold X to have up to three Pikmin nearby automatically carry you back to your base faster than your spaceman can move on his own. It needs to be unlocked in the main game, but I'm almost positive it's there from the start in multiplayer.

It opens up the narrative can of worms that you activate it by pretending to be dead, and the Pikmin are presumably trying to harvest you to produce more Pikmin the way they do with other corpses.

What the fuck!!

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Just watched the Pikmin 2 pinch-hitter-for-Sim-City stream...

it boggles my mind that a lot of people (seem to?) still be mystified by watching Pikmin 2 and require more detailed explanations. I thought it was pretty obvious what was going on just a few minutes into the original Pikmin 2 stream (and I haven't played Pikmin 1 since probably a month or two after it first came out).

 

So either you have a vocal chat minority of people who claim to be confused without actually wanting to understand, or I am truly elite in my astute comprehension of Games.

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Well, the people who don't understand are going to say they don't, while the people that do are going to stay quiet, unless they want to be assholes and mock ignorance.

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Well, the people who don't understand are going to say they don't, while the people that do are going to stay quiet, unless they want to be mean and mock ignorance.

 

I guess that's the benefit of watching most of the streams after-the-fact -- when there is nobody to listen to your complaints in real-time, it frees you up to watch the screen with your eyes and mind until the light of understanding dawns in those eyes and in that mind, as was my experience. (The only mysterious thing was what the cherries did, but that was explained in both sessions).

 

Note, I'm not opposed to the creation of a Pikmin 2 101 video-recording. I enjoy watching that game particularly so more vicarious multiplayer with wacky banter, in lieu of owning the software product my own self, is welcome.

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Your pikmin streams have convinced me to download a dolphin emulator and buy an adapter to plug my GCN controllers into USB. I'm going in all the way on this. Mario Sunshine in HD on my laptop. Hell yes.

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