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Jake

Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef

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Interesting difference between Brad's tone when talking about Tomb Raider on this and the bombcast.

How do you mean?

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He seemed more positive on the bombcast. At first I thought that one day between the bombcast and Idle Thumbs had made him less positive on it but then I read his review just now.

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Reading the Idle Thumbs wikia entry for Space Cop a few minutes before listening to the cast made the discussion of Mass Effect particularly ... arresting

I am confused by everything here. I didn't know people were updating the Idle Thumbs Wiki, I also don't know what Space Cop is doing there. Is this a reference to a previous episode we've forgotten about? Did that entry JUST get added because of this week?

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I am confused by everything here. I didn't know people were updating the Idle Thumbs Wiki, I also don't know what Space Cop is doing there. Is this a reference to a previous episode we've forgotten about? Did that entry JUST get added because of this week?

According to the Wiki history page, it was created back in August of 2011.

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According to the Wiki history page, it was created back in August of 2011.

Christ. We are the same forever.

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Reading the Idle Thumbs wikia entry for Space Cop a few minutes before listening to the cast made the discussion of Mass Effect particularly ... arresting

 

sorry

but also:

TC_SPACECOPS.jpg

I laughed myself into tears reading this wiki entry. Jesus, is this a thing? Is there really an entire wiki populated with completely made-up content about games that don't exist?

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Niyeaux, we are of the same mind. That is what should happen. Context for the cast's invented games.

The date thing is a great thing. I can't place the previous episode it belongs to, if any, because the wiki is only partially constructed.

A second possibility: Wouldn't it be possible to mess with the wiki web form in such a way as to instruct the ITW database that it was receiving an entry in August 2011 when in fact it was February 2013?

A third possibility: PHAEDRUS

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It was back when Chris was replaying ME1, a few episodes before the standalone expansion PAX in the Breckon days, I think. He was saying that he wished the early part of the game on the Citadel was the whole game, and either Jake or Nick said "so you wish it was just Space Cop?"

 

NB: I am behind on the podcast. If this is the same conversation that generated the more recent "Space Cop" reference (which I have not heard yet), then I apologize to Jake for confirming his "same forever" sadness.

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I kind of take (historical) beef with the assertion that Tomb Raider's violence isn't gendered. This has probably been better explored in the Tomb Raider thread; but I think there's a massive world of difference between Nathan Drake taking a bullet to the gut and Lara Croft, a character who is synonymous to the sex symbol of video games, moaning and gasping while pulling a piece of rebar out of her side. You can make a game sexy or violent and it will probably be crass but not without precedent, but taking a series that is already so heavily associated with sexiness and mixing in such gratuitous violence against its lead source of titillation is something that you just can't do without making something intensely creepy in the worst possible way.

 

 

 

Also, as long as I'm making an ass out of myself: you guys have been using the word "bespoke" like five times an episode lately as an all-purpose descriptor. Jake used it twice within a few seconds in this episode to describe two completely different things. It is distracting to me and now it will be distracting to everyone else.

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He seemed more positive on the bombcast. At first I thought that one day between the bombcast and Idle Thumbs had made him less positive on it but then I read his review just now.

 

I know what you mean. He does point out his ambivalence at a couple of points, both because of certain uneven elements in the game, and because of the events (marketing and stuff) leading up to his experiencing the game. He had to make an effort to judge the game on its own merits without all that baggage.

 

Not that it's necessary to attempt to judge things that way, but that's the sort of review model that Giant Bomb descends from. 

 

It sounds like a weird game.

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It's worth noting that two of the people haven't played the game at all, and can't comment much on the specific portrayal of the violence. As for your points about moaning being inherently sexual, I don't buy that because that's not how I read it because I'm not a middle school boy. To me, saying that because she used to be the sex symbol of video games ca. the late 90s is like saying you couldn't take Eternal Sunshine seriously because Jim Carrey's a whacky goofball. Until I see a statement from the director or voice actor saying that she was specifically supposed to be in sexy pain, it just sounds to me like pain (albeit acted pain). Obviously it draws a reaction from people like you so it seems fair to ask the developers to specifically try to tone down the elements people object to. I still don't buy the crap about everything she does being inherently titilating (I paraphrase, but you made some pretty broad claims to that effect).

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I still don't buy the crap about everything she does being inherently titilating (I paraphrase, but you made some pretty broad claims to that effect).

 

Isn't everything a young, beautiful, athletic woman does inherently titillating on some level? I mean, we don't have dumpy fat dudes selling us soda and cellphones on TV.

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To be fair, the space cop paradigm is pretty obvious. Bioware stopped short of actually naming paragon/renegade good cop/bad cop, but that was obviously the intent... at least at first, before it got sucked into the same crap vortex as all video game morality systems. My sentiments on playing the game mirrored Chris's pretty exactly, and though I did enjoy the more exotic adventuring the game offered later on I was quite disappointed at yet another save the universe video game plot. Fuck the universe, I like space copping.

 

Instead I just ended up space-copping a feel of alien booby in a creepy cutscene. :( :( frowny face.

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"Bespoke" is the Tesla of words lately.

Bespoke moratorium needed. A moratorium uniquely made and declared for the word bespoke.

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Listening to Steam time played being reported as lifespan eaten values, I'm wondering how much time Chris has actually spent in these games.  We all know Steam's time played records are rather iffy (while idle time when you walked away from the game to make some tea or the like will boost it, Steam has also been rather good at failing to track additions via momentary connectivity loses to the Steam servers and other bugs) and how long ago did Steam start tracking the time played?  Was Zuma Deluxe out on the platform quite a while (2006 if Steam's store page is accurate) before they started tracking that data, when did Chris start playing?

 

 

I was just listening to the Blender podcast today, and they were talking about programming GPUs to accelerate rendering (which sounds kind of obvious). Apparently ATI GPUs are completely incapable of running function calls, which is weird and interesting to me.

 

Is this GPGPU (compute) stuff (GPUs obviously accelerate rendering, they are the things which DX or OGL passes their data to to do all the polygon render work, but now they are also starting to get used for the data pass before the drawing triangles stage beyond the original idea of shaders as small code fragements to run during the render stage)?  The way GPU acceleration typically works is that the inner loop is pushed to the GPU to operate on in a massively parallel way.

 

Your CPU has good performance for general code thanks to branch prediction, out of order flips, and several other tweaks to a classic processor (required due to the deep pipeline, knowing the result of an if statement may take quite some time so you have to get good at guessing which branch to start executing down and if you got it wrong you have to flush and go back so generating heat for no real work done), while the GPU is a far dumber beast but with so many processing units that it can get the job done of running the millions of code fragments to render each frame in reasonable time.  For this reason the use of GPU compute has traditionally been limited to looking at a loop (which gives obvious parallelization if each execution isn't dependent on the previous iteration, say for munching a large array to repeatedly calculate the new position or something) and just making a kernel out of the inner loop to throw at the GPU, avoid branches and go for fragments as small as possible.  It makes sense as that is the traditional work that a GPU has been tuned to perform well at.

 

Why I think you're talking about this specific element is that you bring up ATi (AMD).  A year ago nVidia announced Kepler and the introduction of Dynamic Parallelism to CUDA 5.0 which allows the GPU to spawn off new instances without going back to the CPU to manage the deployment of work.  Kernels can create child kernels without the CPU being involved and some of their numbers show that certain tasks were being constrained by the CPU needing to manage it all in previous hardware/software.  As far as I'm aware AMD have not responded with a similar tech for reducing the CPU load on compute tasks for their architecture.  This sounds like it is what you're describing (please correct me if I've gotten the wrong end of the stick, I didn't listen to the podcast you reference) and searching for nVidia Dynamic Parallelism should provide some decent background reading if you're looking for more detailed information.

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Isn't everything a young, beautiful, athletic woman does inherently titillating on some level? I mean, we don't have dumpy fat dudes selling us soda and cellphones on TV.

Well yeah, exactly. That's why saying the developers deliberately sexualized the violence against her is a bit silly. They don't have to do it deliberately - that's just how certain male brains will interpret violence against an attractive woman.

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Well yeah, exactly. That's why saying the developers deliberately sexualized the violence against her is a bit silly. They don't have to do it deliberately - that's just how certain male brains will interpret violence against an attractive woman.

 

Saying "certain male brains" is just as disingenuous, though. If you're going to position an attractive woman as the head of a triple-A video game, there will be implications and you should be aware of them. The PR equivalent of a shrug doesn't cut it when sexism is such a hot-button topic.

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This reminds me that I'd love to see a Mass Effect game that combined the sort of RPG dialog options, and space exploration with XCOM's turn based tactical combat. Both would emphasize consequences in the game environment.

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I kind of take (historical) beef with the assertion that Tomb Raider's violence isn't gendered. This has probably been better explored in the Tomb Raider thread; but I think there's a massive world of difference between Nathan Drake taking a bullet to the gut and Lara Croft, a character who is synonymous to the sex symbol of video games, moaning and gasping while pulling a piece of rebar out of her side.

Yeah, good point, the fact that it is Lara Croft who's made to suffer sets the violence in a different context. But even detached from her legacy the way they seem to have chosen to portrait her enduring emotional and physical pain looks quite problematic - see, she has character and all, she is nerdy and then shocked and horrified and cries over a killed animal, but yeah, now look at her butt or down her cleavage, and we make you, we fixed the camera and we rather let her shiver than give her a jacket, and all the time she is just one shower away from being the prettiest girl at the prom.

 

That video you linked to is properly creepy, as are the comments following it.

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The way the Lara Croft character has been used for advertising has always been creepy. I remember throughout the PS1 era the selection of the model who would pose as Lara in the adverts and go to game events was a big deal. The UK mags used to run double spread features on it. That was dumb but it's a little upsetting that in 15 years our society no longer finds sex adequately stimulating and marketers feel it must be paired with violence.

It is possible that the moaning, wet tank topped, man murdering Lara was conceived independently of a marketing department, but it is being placed front and centre every time I see anything about this game.

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