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Jake

Idle Thumbs '95: H.D. Cool Spot

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The reality: You will be home alone, watching the BAFTA livestream.  You will see Jake and Sean approach, alongside the man pictured in your avatar.  As he passes, he looks into the camera and stares into your soul.

 

Later, you track down Jake and Sean at Terminal 3, having followed them all the way from their hotel;  stalking them on the street, choosing the next carriage over in the Heathrow Xpress, purposefully slowing down so as to not overtake them as they mill about, confused by the subterranean tangle of platforms at Heathrow.  

 

You accost them at the Virgin Atlantic check-in desk, and begin your prepared remarks, demanding to know why you were snubbed.

 

When you begin, your speech is filled with bitterness and recrimination.  But as the minutes tick by and you continue, there is a tone switch.  No longer are you angry and hurt;  now you are seeking to impress them, to show that you could hold your own onstage beside Samuel L Jackson, to earn a place on the roster of award show plus-ones.

 

You are amazing.  Full of baboos and wizards, your emotion so raw that even a vitality sensor could pick it up.  You mime the horsebag with aplomb, and Sean sees a realistically-rendered Ballmer before his very eyes.  

 

As your soliloquy reaches its crescendo, you drop to your knees, sobbing.  

 

 

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Starting to wish I went for the "BAFTAs +1" kickstarter tier now.

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I'd avoided any discussion of Journey everywhere on the net and gave up on it for Idle Thumbs. Even though specifics weren't involved it just gave me this itch that I'm missing out on something tremendous. If I don't get to it soon I'm going to feel so ashamed about it that I may skip it. That's an awful mindset to have!

 

Also I forgot about Idle Thumbs having a new episode and only just now got to it.

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I'm so sad that Journey is a PS3 exclusive, because that means I'll never get to play it and will only ever experience it through descriptions like in this podcast..

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Someone was lamenting the lack of one-way streets in Sim City, found this tidbit:
 

One way streets are pretty hard to do with the Glassbox agent system. Because everything is an agent and sort of persistent, you have to make sure those agents don't get stuck in one-way deadends. For instance, say you have a one-way from the highway connection to your city. All tourists, delivery trucks, etc. would be stuck in your city forever, with an ever increasing number of agents.
Also, with one-way roads you could make a city in different parts connected with one-way roads in such a way, that those parts are completely isolated from each other and the world, while the system still thinks it's all connected.
They really want one-way roads in, but it might take a while before we will see them.



http://simcityhall.net/viewtopic.php?id=277&p=2

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I'm so sad that Journey is a PS3 exclusive, because that means I'll never get to play it and will only ever experience it through descriptions like in this podcast..

 

yeah, journey could be a great game that i would want to tell everybody to play, but i will never know because of exclusivity bullshit 

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I dunno if you guys are gonna get to the Playstation 4 next episode at all but I thought I'd drop this here. In Idle Thumbs XI-2, at the 23:22 mark, Steve Gaynor says recording videos inside your games is the future. Which was something Sony made a point about for the PS4.

 

So I guess he called that.

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It makes sense, but it also really makes me want to craft a "city of no escape" as it describes. That seems like a problem that could manifest itself in many hilarious ways and would end up being fixable by the player having to come to terms with it in the same way an actual city planner would. Maybe have a "allow one-way roads" checkbox as sort of a hardcore mode?

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It makes sense, but it also really makes me want to craft a "city of no escape" as it describes. That seems like a problem that could manifest itself in many hilarious ways and would end up being fixable by the player having to come to terms with it in the same way an actual city planner would. Maybe have a "allow one-way roads" checkbox as sort of a hardcore mode?

I think part of the point is that the player isn't supposed to have to get bogged down in managing the simulation at the level of ensuring that individual cars can't get stuck. It's just not really what SimCity is about. That's more the simulational scale that The Sims is concerned with.

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So there's no "Sim Copter 1 reporting heavy traffic" in the new new SimCity? Managing the direction-ness of roads is a powerful tool in traffic management, which I think is part of city management on the level of Sim City. But then again, you could also argue that you should also be able to manage traffic light usage.

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It's definitely more than I personally would want to deal with, but I can see fascinating scenarios arising from it. That's why I suggested it as a "hardcore mode" toggle rather than an always on thing. They could also always just do it as an expansion for the truly devoted (which fits pretty well with elmuerte's comparison, as I believe traffic lights actually WERE added in the expansion for Sim City 4).

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The karateka death character swapping is a mechanic that pops up in ZombiU. I was chatting to a friend about it at work the other day who was suitably impressed.

 

You are given a character and you get to see what their face looks like and a mini bio for example a male retired cop. Then when you die you start back at the beginning of the level, this time for example as a female teacher. You then have to make your way back to where you died and fight the now zombified remains of your previous host to get back your sweet loot. neat

 

Shame it's on the WiiU, it might as well have been created in another dimension

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The karateka death character swapping is a mechanic that pops up in ZombiU. I was chatting to a friend about it at work the other day who was suitably impressed.

 

You are given a character and you get to see what their face looks like and a mini bio for example a male retired cop. Then when you die you start back at the beginning of the level, this time for example as a female teacher. You then have to make your way back to where you died and fight the now zombified remains of your previous host to get back your sweet loot. neat

 

Shame it's on the WiiU, it might as well have been created in another dimension

Yea I've played it a bit at a friend's and it's a pretty interesting and hard game. The Wii-u is a weird target platform for it. It was neat sorting inventory on the controller screen but eh, would be nice seeing it elsewhere.

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Now that the PS4 has off screen play on vita and the NextBox will have smart glass, there's a possibility it could come to the other next gen consoles as a downloadable title (in an alternate dimension of course)

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So there's no "Sim Copter 1 reporting heavy traffic" in the new new SimCity? Managing the direction-ness of roads is a powerful tool in traffic management, which I think is part of city management on the level of Sim City. But then again, you could also argue that you should also be able to manage traffic light usage.

 

There is definitely traffic density and traffic density issues, and you can see it right on the road itself since all cars in your city are represented visually. No abstracted traffic copter alert mechanism needed. You can also reduce traffic jams, just not via one way streets. The solutions are to widen roads to allow more lanes (there are a number of road widths which support increasing densities of traffic, though it eventually maxes out) and/or provide alternate viable routes to decrease congestion. One way streets would be a cool additional way to solve congestion, but for the reasons the devs were talking about which Flynn quoted sounds like it's not an easy problem to solve on the simulation side.

 

Here's a pretty cool example of SimCity traffic congestion modeling. The guy created an actual intersection in his hometown that is always gummed up in real life, and tried to use the SimCity beta to see if he could figure out what's causing the constant congestion. It's surely not accurate to real life, but it's a testament to the robustness of SimCity's traffic simulation that he could do what he did and so tangibly observe the results at all.

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It makes sense, but it also really makes me want to craft a "city of no escape" as it describes. That seems like a problem that could manifest itself in many hilarious ways and would end up being fixable by the player having to come to terms with it in the same way an actual city planner would. Maybe have a "allow one-way roads" checkbox as sort of a hardcore mode?

 

Just destroy the road connecting to the highway and brute-force babywall it. 

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OK I had some dental surgery last week I had to recover from so I'm just now listening to this episode but I just wanted to point out that the letter asking about The Receiver was mine. I was listening in the car and turning at an intersection when they blurted out my name which caused me to nearly turn off the road since for just half a second I thought someone was trying to tell me something. The part where they acted like they were just going to skip the question was especially weird as I'm yelling at my phone "NO! DON'T SKIP MY QUESTION!" in the privacy of my car.

 

As for why I thought the game was called The Receiver instead of just Receiver, I blame goty.cx.

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I guess in the future there was one shitty architect that got the contract of a lifetime after that super earthquake that leveled every city on the planet. 

 

The city I grew up (near Cincinnati, Ohio) in was pretty small, but in the 40s GE opened a huge airplane manufacturing facility nearby. A lot of new people started moving in, so hundreds of cheap houses were built in our city and the surrounding area, using the same handful of floor plans over and over. There are roads with dozens of identical houses, except with three different porch designs and a few different paint jobs. 

 

I guess what I'm saying is, maybe everyone in the future lives in a weird boom town around a factory? 

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I have to say I've really loved the extra little audio flourishes and "wait, what?" moments of the last few episodes.  That mild cheekiness in production, combined with the slow, inevitable reemergence of running gags, has really made the show feel more confident; very much in line with the show's original run.

 

Please keep it up.  Don't be afraid to go all Video Game Baby on us from time to time.  We can take it.

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