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Jake

Idle Thumbs 122: Mario's Picnic

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Sean, I preferred playing Witcher 2 with keyboard and mouse. Just memorize the hotkeys for Igni and Quen and you'll do fine. Also, the tutorial is a bit crap.

 

 

Also, I lost it completely when it turned out that Sean was objecting to the use of pillow to kill the baby and not infanticide in general.

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I thought that the way the Last of Us ended was the best way they could have ended that game, but it made me dislike the story they told when i reflected back on it.

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2) The tutorial was patched in for the Expanded Edition, and not something you ran into in the initial version. Both Witchers 1 & 2 got a free, and comprehensive, upgrade/polish passes almost a year after their releases. One of my favorite qualities of the eastern euro games is their near hostility to the player. "Here, we made this, YOU figure it out." It's a fun mystery! 

 

I'm playing STALKER many years after the fact, and I'm definitely impressed with that aspect of it.

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I goddamn lost it while walking down a busy street when Jake made Firetruck-crashing-into-office noises.

 

Thanks Jake.

 

Congrats Nick

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Also I agree with feelthedarkness that Witcher 2 doesn't seem like much of a "Thumbs Game", even if it is great. MirrorMoon EP, on the other hand, seems like a total Thumbs Game. It is by an Italian indie studio I've never heard of. It features outer space and trying to figure out how to play the game seems like an important component (i.e. I think it's cool, but I still haven't figured it out yet). It just came out on Steam.

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I quite liked the ending of The Last of Us, but had a problem with the last bit of gameplay before it.

 

In general do readers feel a game ends with the last piece of narrative content? or is the last piece of important  interaction? or even the far broader idea of the last coherent sequence of content?

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Chris, I always enjoy hearing your opinion on AAA games (and any other game for that matter) whether it is negative or positive and I imagine the majority of people that listen to the podcast feel the same way. That is one of the things I enjoy so much about Idle Thumbs. You guys call out some universally loved games on bullshit that everybody else ignores while highlighting awesome things about other games that nobody else seems to notice. If people can't handle a perspective different than their own then they can eat a giant 8-bit cock.

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I will say I really enjoyed the conversation about the Last of Us just because everyone was coming from a pretty different place in terms of how they experienced it. Made me curious what the Bioshock Infinite discussion would have been like if there had been one person that was really into that game. Maybe in some parallel universe...

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I still really need to play The Witcher 2. Perhaps it is the Far Cry 2 of the Citizen Kanes of Video Games?

Honestly, it was incredibly cathartic to hear from people I respect immensely that most every game starts out terrible. I am currently volunteering on a project with a bunch AAA-folks and somehow I wound up the designer. We just played our first build and I was up until 12 A.M. (I get to work at 5 A.M.) frantically trying to figure out how to make our not fun video game fun. I still have no clue, but it's nice to know I am not alone.

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After the unexpected mass that was the Thumbs meetup broke into smaller groups, the one I was in ended up back at the convention center and we played Ticket to Ride Europe.  I'd seen the American map played before on youtube, but this was my first time playing the game myself.  I agree that the European version seemed better.  It adds some mechanics that were pretty neat and let me eventually win the game.

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I was so close. ):

 

But at least I didn't get last place! GO ME!

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It surprised me how you almost caught up at the end.  I was a little scared when you showed that completed 21 point ticket.  If I were smarter, I would have ended the game sooner instead of trying to tack those last few trains onto my already huge snake of a train.  It was a lot of fun though.  Three thumbs up (but I don't have three thumbs).

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Witcher 2 needs a little bit of perseverance, out of the gate. I never played the first one, heard a lot about how great both 1 and 2 are, and finally picked up the second in a Steam sale awhile ago.

 

Initially, the combat was SUPER off-putting. It was awkward and difficult and didn't feel very good. But I stuck with it, and eventually I started to click with the way the game does things, and then it started to get enjoyable.

 

I played on PC with an Xbox controller, and the gamepad definitely felt like the better option, over keyboard and mouse. 

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I don't mean to alarm you guys, but it's September. I realize this may be worrisome.

Did I say August at the opening of the episode?

In general do readers feel a game ends with the last piece of narrative content? or is the last piece of important interaction? or even the far broader idea of the last coherent sequence of content?

This seems pretty easy to overthink. For me a game is over when the last piece of game content goes away. I think that's especially the case in a game like The Last Of Us, where the cinematic stuff is at least intended to be making commentary on the interactive stuff.

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I think he's sarcastically referring to your worry about commenting on AAA games.

 

Anyway, it's awesome to here Nels talk about Netrunner because I just played in a Netrunner tournament yesterday. I also placed 5th, but only out of about 20. It's such a fucking great game. On the comment about high-level play and bluffing, it does get tougher because the card pool is small enough that a highly-skilled Runner can know exactly what cards the Corp can activate at any point. They won't know what specifically is coming up, but they have enough knowledge to know what to be scared of. Also, I think there probably is an imbalance favouring the Runner, at least with the current card pool (although the latest expansion pack seems to mitigate that) but it's only present at very high level play, so it shouldn't really concern most players.

 

Nels, you should totally start a thread so that we can geek out about this.

 

The comparison to bluffing among high level poker players reminded me about a super interesting interview with a poker play on this episode of Radiolab: http://www.radiolab.org/2013/mar/26/ in which she points out that bluffing and reading bluffs is NOT a tactic used among high level players because it's not reliable.

 

For example, someone might bluff that they have a shitty hand, thinking they have a good hand, and might actually have a shitty hand. So if you're trying to read their bluff you're not taking into account that their information might be bad, thus making your own information bad.

 

Not sure how much this ties into Netrunner, having never played it, but it was an interesting "Did You Know" type factoid that I thought was worth sharing.

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Witcher 2 needs a little bit of perseverance, out of the gate. I never played the first one, heard a lot about how great both 1 and 2 are, and finally picked up the second in a Steam sale awhile ago.

 

Initially, the combat was SUPER off-putting. It was awkward and difficult and didn't feel very good. But I stuck with it, and eventually I started to click with the way the game does things, and then it started to get enjoyable.

 

Has anyone tried this?

 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/06/20/witcher-2-combat-mod/

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Regarding Chris' comment about feeling stressed about expressing his opinions on triple A games, I have to kind of admit that sometimes it can be kind of a downer to listen to some of the criticisms of some games. I don't know if it's because you guys are in the industry, so there's this version of games that you see that I don't tend to, but sometimes it can come off as being a bit cynical. Like last week when talking about Plants Versus Zombies 2, there was just this assumption that "Somewhere along the line, this game will force me to pay money to beat it" when I hear that wasn't the case and this was a rare exception to the rule. Or with the Last of Us in the context of "Surely some sequels will come out and the story will go on." which I really hope doesn't happen since all I can see is it taking away from the experience that I had with that game.

 

Anyway, sorry if it sounds like I'm just nitpicking your opinions. In general I really love this podcast because you guys will say and think things that I normally don't get anywhere else. And you guys are smart enough dudes to express things in a way that makes sense even when I disagree with your opinions. Thanks for the podcasts and your streams (that go in my face)!

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Did I say August at the opening of the episode?

 

You said "August." It was great. No really, great.

 

Also, I loved this cast, a lot of good discussion, but you guys seriously need to chill out with the worries about repeating yourselves from past episodes. Repetition is inevitable, but as it stands, we're getting repetition of your worries about repetition, which is always less interesting than what you were worried about repeating. Just let the conversation flow!

 

 

EDIT: Oops, guess I've made my constructive criticism into a trend!

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i believe we are the most critical of the things we love and feel are important, and i listen with that in mind, and in the end if i feel that certain criticisms made are not important to me i can ignore them, and if i agree with them i agree, i listen to the podcast because i like it, so don't worry too much about it (that wasn't sarcastic or ironic)

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Repetition of stories isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Typically there will be variations in details that keep things interesting.

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I think they need to repeat themselves more.  When's the last time Jake asked someone "Did you beat it?"  Where are the baboos?  Where are the puffins?  WHERE ARE THE WIZARDS???

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Man there are some stories I must've heard at least a dozen times on some podcasts I listen to. I never mind it!

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