Jake

Idle Thumbs 105: XCOM Obama

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Idle Thumbs 105:

 

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XCOM Obama

It's Discovery Week here at the Thumb, where we play a bunch of games whose fun comes from learning how to play them. We finally sit down and play our first campaign of Risk: Legacy, Chris falls into CandyBox and Starseed Pilgrim, and Sean takes to the stars to face the nation's most formidable foe.

 

Games Discussed: Risk: Legacy, CandyBox, Starseed Pilgrim, XCOM: Enemy Unknown

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If you are really into board games there are plenty of ways to see everything you are going to get in your game before you get it. I don't play board games at all and yet I watch a TON of The Dice Tower, which is a great video and podcast covering board games. Tom Vasel runs it and does a lot of videos where he will break down a game, how it is played, what parts it includes, and his thoughts on all of it. Worth checking out for anyone into any kind of gaming.

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I heard there would be cookies. Where are the cookies?

cookie -->  :devil:

 

It's been nine whole minutes since I found out about them, and yet they are still not here.

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I really want to play board games, but none of my friends ever do :(  

 

Over spring break I finally managed to get two friends to play Pandemic with me. They were starting to get into it and actually enjoy it, but then we lost and now it will probably never get played again.

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That quote note Chris dropped about Sean renaming the British Isles "Ireland" is my favorite thing. Well done Sean.

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The first five seconds strangely sounded to me like the way Miss Piggy sounds when she gets angry and punches Kermit.  I'm not even one minute into the cast and already the mental image of the Thumbs crew in my head has been replaced with Muppets.

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What did Jake's head look like?

Listening to Sean talk about XCOM makes me want to play it and also not play it. I get super attached to people in games, to the point that in games that have parts that give you nameless grunts to accompany you I will instantly reload a save if any of them die.

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i played candy box through most of this podcast, i think the interesting/addictive thing about this game is the enjoyment i get from figuring out the most efficient way of doing things, eg is it more efficient to eat the candy and do quests or spend the candy on weapons or spending it on lollipops and planting them so i can give them to the sorceress, being efficient is something i like to do in most games and that includes an FPS game where i decide what order and with what weapon killing the bad guys is the most efficient, being efficient is fun in a weird way  

 

also i am pretty sure that imagination is the only thing to go beyond the limits of our universe, but apparently "wrong"

 

also on the Xcom iron man mode thing, i just don't like to play games in that way, saving and loading is part of the reason i love games, i like to play game in a way that is a bit like the film "Next" with nicolas cage, i like to try things out and if they fail i load the game until i do something that works then i continue on with the game, so if there was a video of my gameplay it would be the cut version without the mistakes, i sort of apply this weird logic to action films where i kind of believe that the spectacular thing people do in these films are actually just the best version and the times they failed have been cut out 

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I guess I consider myself a "completionist," but it's definitely not some sort of self-styled label. I just get really anxious about missing out on content, especially in open-world games, so I cope by hundred-percenting, if I can. I mean, if a game is clearly designed to lock out content as a gameplay mechanic, like The Witcher 2 or The Walking Dead, that's fine, but the first Assassin's Creed was almost unplayable for me because of those stupid little flags hidden everywhere.

 

Conversely, though I enjoyed Risk: Legacy a lot, my group made it about ten games in before ditching it. The unlocking mechanics are really awesome, but at the end of the day, you're still playing Risk, which only has so much juice in it. I would really love to see you guys play Battlestar Galactica or even Shadows over Camelot. Nick would lose his mind in a game that's actually about betrayal rather than just supporting it.

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I think the whole "Huge discovery" thing, where you don't know what to expect from a game and yet it keeps showing you new stuff, is what keeps Bethesda's games selling so well. To me, that's what Morrowind did, this amazing journey of "wow, you can do this and that and there's this crazy thing!"

 

And ever since then just about every Bethesda game has been a disappointment relative to that first experience. I've been wondering if it's that first experience of ever playing their style of game that really sells them, versus how good each of their games are individually. Trying to play Skyrim again, heavily modded, has been a bit interesting, but going back to look at the progress on OpenMw (an open source Morrowind engine replacement) and just the things I can see, and remember. I'm not sure how much "better" each game is versus the other, but if you want that experience of discovering things for the first time, Skyrim has nothing on Morrowind.

 

Just looking at the enchantment screen in Morrowind where you can enchant stuff, you can do ANYTHING. Literally any spell, any effect, whatever you want. Want your damned shoes to explode in a fireball? YOU CAN DO THAT. I still remember playing Morrowind for the first time, and outside the first town, the FIRST THING you encounter is a wizard falling out of the fucking sky and dying. And you search his corpse and find this scroll, and you go "oh, scroll of, jumping a lot, what does this do?" You try it, and the next time you jump you FLY ACROSS THE ENTIRE FUCKING MAP in a single leap, probably landing in the water and surviving and just going "Holy Fuck!" I miss Bethesda being able to do that kind of thing.

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Just looking at the enchantment screen in Morrowind where you can enchant stuff, you can do ANYTHING.

 

You can't enchant arrows.

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As someone who re-listens to the Thumb back catalog somewhat often, I really got a kick out of those "GULP!"s at the end. Classic Gaynor.

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It's always incredible to me how the Idle Thumbs crew is good at both in-depth discussion of gameplay mechanics and also spontaneously generating and exploring memes like "No love for Dad?" Two completely different parts of the brain.

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Sean, if you could post a list of the QBs you commanded in XCOM my heart would be warmed.

 

Also I feel dumb because I'm not sure if this "No Love for Dad" is from something.

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"No love for dad?" Just sounds like "No blood for alien" in my head. Also the Steve impressions were the best.

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Also the Steve impressions were the best.

 

Yeah! I was thinking, it'd be a living nightmare to hear an audio recording of my friends making fun of my voicemail message, but since I'm not Steve, it's the best. No really, it is.

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Risk Legacy, so good, though difficult to discuss after the 12 games our group has played. Like StarSeed Pilgrim and CandyBox, much of the experience is tied to the discovery in opening those sealed packages.

 

I'm looking forward to Rob's next legacy style game, which I believe will be published by Plaid Hat Games. No details as of yet, sadly.

Psychology Experiment Disguised as Minor Risk Legacy Spoiler:

Do not look under the box tray. Ever.

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Sweet cast. Thanks. Been playing candy box today (and will probably be playing it for the rest of the week)

As an addition, how would you feel about sticking the casts on soundcloud? Or do you not want to split the stats/ listener base or whatever. It's just that when I listen to the cast at work both your QuickTime version and listening through iTunes are not the best experience

For example (I just stumbled across this today and was like... Huh, podcasts on soundcloud)

https://soundcloud.com/guardianbookspodcast

Also we can leave time specific comments, that's would be fun, and you can like and share and embed and do all that other social bullshit. iTS THE FUTURe. All idle casts on a single page and you can click on any of them at anytime and just start listening without being asked to update iTunes. Pretty hot amiright

Oh and, what's wrong with blood dragon? You can't tease us like that

I believe Tony hawks had different skaters with different stats but they were all available at the beginning. As I would imagine the titular tony would be the best, lord of skating if you will, and you'd be pretty pissed off if he was a locked character in 'tony hawks pro skater'

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Sweet cast. Thanks. Been playing candy box today (and will probably be playing it for the rest of the week)

As an addition, how would you feel about sticking the casts on soundcloud? Or do you not want to split the stats/ listener base or whatever. It's just that when I listen to the cast at work both your QuickTime version and listening through iTunes are not the best experience

For example (I just stumbled across this today and was like... Huh, podcasts on soundcloud)

https://soundcloud.com/guardianbookspodcast

Also we can leave time specific comments, that's would be fun, and you can like and share and embed and do all that other social bullshit. iTS THE FUTURe

Oh and, what's wrong with blood dragon? You can't tease us like that

I believe Tony hawks had different skaters with different stats but they were all available at the beginning. As I would imagine the titular tony would be the best, lord of skating if you will, and you'd be pretty pissed off if he was a locked character in 'tony hawks pro skater'

 

Other than the stuff about leaving comments or whatever, is there some key feature our website audio player doesn't have?

 

http://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/xcom-obama

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 sort of apply this weird logic to action films where i kind of believe that the spectacular thing people do in these films are actually just the best version and the times they failed have been cut out 

 

In order to enjoy the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, it is necessary for me to apply this kind of thinking to the part where that bomb rolls up to Legolas' feet and then doesn't explode. "Oh, lots of sons of cursed pirates got blown up every day. They only made a movie about the luckiest one."

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Other than the stuff about leaving comments or whatever, is there some key feature our website audio player doesn't have?

The only real problem I have is in both your online version and iTunes Player they don't offer very precise control over where you want to listen from

So if the phone rings or I get distracted (or low and behold have to do some work) and I pause the cast, when i resume i'll want to jump back 10secs but instead I'm fiddling around with that tiny little marker and it seems like it increments every 45secs. So if I get stopped a lot whilst listening to you I find myself having to re-listen to whole minutes over and over and over again hey do you ever wish you could rewind time

What would be mega sweet would be adding a -15sec and +15 sec button on your online player, on either side of that big sexy play button http://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/xcom-obama

Don't hate me, I bet that would be a huge pain in the arse to do :)

Not an actual problem more of a very mild inconvenience, if we were to measure this on the scovilles scale this problem would be a green pepper where as having Nick Breckon back is a scotch bonnet or not recieving my kickstarter postcard being a ghost chilli

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