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Jake

Idle Thumbs 112: The Cast Of Us

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Boost the Hedgehog

 

just don't look up "Congrats Nick the Hedgehog"

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I'm glad you guys are playing a little more Ace Patrol because of my comment about how you can adjust the difficulty level. I've been playing a lot less of it lately because of XCOM for the iOS, but it's still a nice lunch break type game.

 

I got Letterpress awhile ago but never played it because I wasn't able to convince any friends of mine to pick it up, but after listening to you guys talk about it I think I need to redouble my efforts.

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Also thanks for the thisgame.co shout out, that website looks sweet.

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I think it's fitting that Idle Thumbs is the only current podcast that lets us listen to stupid midi music, please keep it up.

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Oh man, I just listened to the outro music. You guys are mentally synced up with my girlfriend. She was playing that same melody on a cat synthesizer app for her iPad a few days ago.

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Hearing about how long The Last of Us is makes me less inclined to continue playing it at all. I tend to prefer economical storytelling aided by heavy duty editing; it's ok sometimes for a work to be lengthy, but it had better be something special.

I'm routinely flabbergasted by how long stupid action movies are lately. What hack thinks he has more than 90 minutes worth of stuff to say about a guy who dresses up as a bat and fights crime?

I get that it feels like burning a wheelbarrow full of money when you cut a relatively complete segment out of a game, but get over it, everyone.

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Hearing about how long The Last of Us is makes me less inclined to continue playing it at all. I tend to prefer economical storytelling aided by heavy duty editing; it's ok sometimes for a work to be lengthy, but it had better be something special.

I'm routinely flabbergasted by how long stupid action movies are lately. What hack thinks he has more than 90 minutes worth of stuff to say about a guy who dresses up as a bat and fights crime?

I get that it feels like burning a wheelbarrow full of money when you cut a relatively complete segment out of a game, but get over it, everyone.

 

I'm the exact opposite. I much prefer things to be long and drawn out. My problem with shorter movies or shorter games is that I feel things are usually distilled to a point where you only get big scenes or profound moments (or at least a much higher density of them compared to the mundane stuff). For me it is the mundane moments or non-critical story moments that you get in longer movies/games that draw me into the story more. 99% of my life is filled with mundane moments and every once in awhile something profound happens so when a movie or game more closely reflects that reality it is more satisfying to me.

 

This is a big reason why I like Final Fantasy and Elder Scrolls games so much. Instead of a 6 hour Call of Duty style campaign where you get non-stop crazy moments you have a 40+ hour experience with a lot of mundane and less exciting stuff that is punctuated every once in awhile by a big moment. I can totally see how this would be a turnoff for a lot of people but I love that shit.

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Repetition in games is interesting (which I think is more the issue then how long or short a particular work is). Last time I checked Steam, I sunk over 80 hours into XCOM. And here I am playing it on the iPad some more. I think it is one of those features where the fact that games can be this awkward marriage of narrative and game play. The lighter the narrative, and the more systems driven the game is, the more repetition is acceptable, even desirable. No one gets annoyed by how all you do in Letter Press or Boggle is forming words because that's what the game is. That isn't how narratives typically work though. In a narrative things should be moving along, and typically the protagonist isn't going to be engaging in the same activities over and over again. In AAA games, because of their narrative ambitions -- but typically modest game design ambitions -- you often see these features at cross-purposes with each other.

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It is interesting how often narrative differs from reality. In my life narrative I am engaging in the same activities over and over for years. Then maybe a few things happen and the process repeats. From that perspective I don't mind a game that has a narrative where the protagonist engages in the same activities over and over. I like it because it is more reflective of life in general.

 

But that's just me and I could be retarded.

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It is interesting how often narrative differs from reality. In my life narrative I am engaging in the same activities over and over for years. Then maybe a few things happen and the process repeats. From that perspective I don't mind a game that has a narrative where the protagonist engages in the same activities over and over. I like it because it is more reflective of life in general.

 

But that's just me and I could be retarded.

If The Last Of Us is actually about the repetitive banality of life in the post-apocalyptic world actively, and not accidentally, then that's cool. Or, if that's the experience you're getting out if it, that's cool too. That's not the feeling it conveys to me from the outside, though. BUT I just bought it and am going to start a playthrough this weekend.

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What Jake said is right on. It's not that a narrative can't feature repetition, but it should be there for a specific reason, and not just as a sort of default mode to fall back on.

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BUT I just bought it

 

Congratulations! Your quest is at an end. (I kind of hoped you'd have a story next week about meeting a Craiglist DVD scalper in a Walmart parking lot or something).

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My God, that ending. This is getting out of control, Chris needs to be stopped! I'm recruiting a team of 90's Teenagers with attitude to raid the Idle Thumbs offices.

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If The Last Of Us is actually about the repetitive banality of life in the post-apocalyptic world actively, and not accidentally, then that's cool. Or, if that's the experience you're getting out if it, that's cool too. That's not the feeling it conveys to me from the outside, though. BUT I just bought it and am going to start a playthrough this weekend.

 

Well said.

 

I think my mindset is very similar to what Nick described on the cast about how kids are more tolerant of the boring shit in a game. For some reason I still have a very high tolerance for that kind of stuff and it just doesn't bother me that much. I guess you could say I am a man with a baby brain. But I still like to think that repetitive actions can mean something and add to a game if done right.

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My God, that ending. This is getting out of control, Chris needs to be stopped! I'm recruiting a team of 90's Teenagers with attitude to raid the Idle Thumbs offices.

 

Man, whatever. The closer we get to Salacious Thumb, the better off we all are.

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I am the guy the sponsor pitch was addressing apparently.

 

I've never read The Great Gatsby. I was supposed to back in highschool but I managed to scrape by the class ignoring the book completely. Best part: it was an honors class, which I conned my way into because all my friends were getting into it and our favorite teacher was going to be teaching it.

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I had a really weird experience with The Last of Us because my PS3 is dying. For the first couple of hours of the game I had no technical difficulties at all. But for the next 10 hours I had characters constantly resetting to their default animation. It takes all of the emotion or tension out of the situation when characters are sliding through doors in their default animation instead of going under them, or when they start floating up ladders. And every single time a cutscene would start I had to pause the cutscene and go away for a few minutes while it loaded, or else it would just stutter like crazy. Hopefully nothing like this happens for you guys because it completely ruined the game for me! :(

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I am the guy the sponsor pitch was addressing apparently.

 

I've never read The Great Gatsby. I was supposed to back in highschool but I managed to scrape by the class ignoring the book completely. Best part: it was an honors class, which I conned my way into because all my friends were getting into it and our favorite teacher was going to be teaching it.

 

Did we go to high school together? My friend did the exact same thing.

 

He decided not to read The Great Gatsby for some reason, then spent the next month panicking about the final exam, which was going to be entirely on the book. It ends up, the teacher had an emergency at the last possible minute, so we watched the movie version instead. When the camera reveals Gatsby floating in the pool, my friend blurts out in surprise and distress, "Wait, Gatsby dies?"

 

Wait no, no one could have had Mrs. Threadgold as their favorite teacher. Your charade has been unmasked!

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I didn't find any results for "Vanaman the Hedgehog" so I thought I was doing it wrong.  Then I found this:

 

 

Hold up- are teens creating personas based on fictional characters as a way to explore their own aspirations and identity?

 

That's fucking trill. Go teens. 

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If The Last Of Us is actually about the repetitive banality of life in the post-apocalyptic world actively, and not accidentally, then that's cool. Or, if that's the experience you're getting out if it, that's cool too. That's not the feeling it conveys to me from the outside, though. BUT I just bought it and am going to start a playthrough this weekend.

 

That's sort of what I took from it.  You spend so long fighting for every inch of ground you cover just to get to the next landmark, often at a pace which feels like a crawl.  Without spoiling anything I feel it puts the player in the same mindset of the characters at the end of the story.  I don't think it would have worked as well if it was shorter.  Unfortunately it does it in a way that other video games just insert filler, that is with extra combat scenes and minor puzzles.  That said I actually really liked the pace.  It gave me a breather between intense combat/stealth sections and gave Joel and Ellie a chance to interact in a way that most video games ignore.

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I am very glad Nick piped in with "I think we're just old", because I think it's not THE reason but it is almost 100% a contributing reason to something like this, and I include myself in the oldness conversation.

 

I also wonder if not beating the game (beat the last boss) is a more self-aware experience now. Like you Chris, I routinely don't finish games, and it doesn't usually matter. "Not finishing" Skyrim just meant I didn't complete the longest questline, not that I don't have a sword that shoots demons and I killed every horker. With The Last of Us, finishing the game is what completes the experience, and it may be that it and other games that recently have been built so that the most fulfilling part is finishing it don't have any pieces where you can set it down and feel like you didn't just have a partial experience because you didn't put all (X) hours into it.

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What Jake said is right on. It's not that a narrative can't feature repetition, but it should be there for a specific reason, and not just as a sort of default mode to fall back on.

 

 

That's sort of what I took from it.  You spend so long fighting for every inch of ground you cover just to get to the next landmark, often at a pace which feels like a crawl.  Without spoiling anything I feel it puts the player in the same mindset of the characters at the end of the story.  I don't think it would have worked as well if it was shorter.  Unfortunately it does it in a way that other video games just insert filler, that is with extra combat scenes and minor puzzles.  That said I actually really liked the pace.  It gave me a breather between intense combat/stealth sections and gave Joel and Ellie a chance to interact in a way that most video games ignore.

 

Regarding the repetitive board management, etc sequences: To me, there were three general game states that occurred.
 
A] Combat time. You're actively moving through the environment with the intention of either sneaking past enemies or systematically finding and killing them.
B] Story/action cutscenes that you have no control over. Here, the shit is typically hitting the fan either in terms of hazardous events occurring immediately, or from cumulative tension.
C] Traversal, board management, cool-off time. The reason these sequences didn't overstay their welcome or feel dull to me is that I was usually waiting - and ready - for them to come along.
 
For me it was a natural ebb and flow. I just got done either fighting off equally desperate survivors and/or ravenous infected or carefully sneaking past them because I didn't have enough supplies to take them out. If not those, then I just watched an affecting cutscene that related some new (probably dangerous) news about what I was going to have to go through soon, or reflected on how rough and emotionally draining the thing was that I just got finished doing. Those things are mentally taxing, and make playing the game difficult over multiple sequences. I'm fine with this, since that's what this game brought to the table in spades - the ability to get me emotionally invested and immersed in this terrible situation. TLoU relies on and needs those periods of respite to refocus and pull yourself back together, hear some awesomely corny jokes, read someone's final note, or stop to take in your surroundings - a beautifully rendered and immersive real-world analogue quickly being retaken by nature. I was invested enough in everything that was actively going on around me that when these sequences came up, they were usually just what I needed. It all fit so well for the duration of the game, and always made me want to keep going.
 
If the real complaint here is that the actual act of hitting triangle to move an object is what's getting old, then yeah sure they could have mixed it up a bit. In the end, though, it just didn't make a difference to my experience one way or the other. Most importantly, I feel like they focused on all the right things.
 
I hope you guys are able stick with it all the way, as I feel the resolution is something you'd all find interesting.
 
tl;dr I feel that the traversal-ladderboardpallet sequences ARE there for a very specific reason, and they function quite well in that capacity.

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Did we go to high school together? My friend did the exact same thing.

 

He decided not to read The Great Gatsby for some reason, then spent the next month panicking about the final exam, which was going to be entirely on the book. It ends up, the teacher had an emergency at the last possible minute, so we watched the movie version instead. When the camera reveals Gatsby floating in the pool, my friend blurts out in surprise and distress, "Wait, Gatsby dies?"

 

Wait no, no one could have had Mrs. Threadgold as their favorite teacher. Your charade has been unmasked!

Probably not. Also now that I think about it, describing it as a "con" is actually a really mean way of putting how I got into that class. I actually dropped by a week before classes started just to visit her, and my teacher convinced me to change my class-selection last minute. It required doing a book report over the summer and I did it with the few days left to me. She was super great and loved by everyone (except for homophobes; she was a lesbian).

 

I didn't outright decide to not read The Great Gatsby. I just didn't. I was chaotic like most teenagers are. All I know of the book is that Gatsby is a guy who throws parties and he likes a girl. I think? Oh god I hope I got that much right at least. (the funny thing is when I heard some samples of the music from the latest film I got outraged about historical / setting accuracy)

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