Idle Thumbs 122: Mario's Picnic

[coaxmetal]

I like the episode title, but I was hoping for "A Segue to Nowhere". I like the sound of that.

 

 

Also, I hope Sean sticks with The Witcher 2, the combat is definitely off-putting at first but I ended up really enjoying it after finding the rhythm. I also found using the mouse/keyboard felt better, especially for ui nagivation, but also for combat.

 

[feelthedarkness]

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

 

Oh man, one of my favorites. I love that if you walk like 15 feet south of the starting point it's almost certain death, but if you really push it, you can clear the base. 

[malkav11]

I typically prefer mouse and keyboard even for many games that are explicitly designed with consoles in mind before making their way mostly unchanged to PC (I played the entirety of the original Assassin's Creed that way, for example), but ironically enough The Witcher 2, which is clearly a PC game first and foremost, suits me much better on gamepad. It's just that sort of combat. And there are little things, like how when you pick stuff up with mouse and keyboard, you have to go through a several step process to collect everything, but on a gamepad you just press one button and automatically grab everything. (This might be frustrating if Witcher 2 had limited inventory space or made you worry about carrying capacity but as far as I know it doesn't. Thankfully.)

[Problem Machine]

I gotta say, you guys have been fairly considerate in the past about warning about spoilers and... I dunno. That particular piece of frustration came on a really bad day when I could have really used the entertainment that the cast offered, and having to stop listening to it 15 minutes in was just the cherry on top of a shit sundae. I just... I don't know. Right now I look forward to listening a little bit less than I did before. Hopefully that will go away.

 

I think what really bothers me is that it isn't an oversight. Sean brought it up, and you guys just didn't care enough to even put it in the forum post. Ugh.

[Codicier]

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.

 

Your probably right. While a good ending may (in my opinion) still requires all three of those elements to shine, there's almost no limit to the amount of good work that can be undone if the last piece of game content isn't right.

 

I think the other think worth talking about regarding game endings in general is just how prevalent epilogues are, it seems games are rarely confident enough to just stop. So often they seem to feel a need to explain themselves that the best movies don't.

Idk if this is what The Last of Us's ending does (I've only read the wikipedia article & not played it myself), but to hear you describe it I can imagine that to do something that even resembles a true fade to black moment as soon as the stories arc finishes, may really may be something only those devs with true confidence in both their own skills and their publishers backing can do.

[Sno]

Games slowing down on purpose. Cave bullet hell shooters would slow down to a crawl when there was like 300 bullets on screen because the arcade machine just couldn't handle it. Then, when these games get ported over to consoles and iPhones they have to create fake slow down so it feels the same

Dat feel

At about the 30sec mark

 

When Atlus localized Deathsmiles, they "fixed" a lot of the slowdown, and Cave spent the next few months trying to patch it back into the game.

It was a really amusing example of how a perceived technical fault was actually, if not completely intentional, at least demanded by fans.

[coaxmetal]

This is the "don't worry guys, you aren't doing anything wrong" thread I guess. Nothing wrong with repetion of stories -- if its been long enough that you can't remember if you told the story on the cast, it's probably been long enough that we will be interested to hear it retold. Certainly true of this episode.

 

Also, re: chris worrying about coming off as overly negative about AAA games, I can certainly see some of that. But most often I get the impression that, if you are saying mostly negative things about a game, it is because those are common problems in a games and the rest is probably good, but isn't an interesting conversation. I don't always agree with the criticisms of some AAA games, but hearing them is always interesting and makes me think about it.

[Johnny Driggs]

Anyone got that The Last of Us discussion end timestamp?

 

Man, the time they refer readers to the YouTube version and I'm late this week. I am the worst YouTubeman.

[Problem Machine]

Johnny Driggs, I just wanted to let you know that at the tiny size on the forum overview screen your Makoto avatar looks like a cowboy with a black hat, tiny stick figure legs and a huge muscled upper body, scratching the back of his head. That is all.

 

Oh crap by posting this I'm making it difficult for other forum-goers to verify. What a Catch-22!

[shammack]

[Johnny Driggs]

Johnny Driggs, I just wanted to let you know that at the tiny size on the forum overview screen your Makoto avatar looks like a cowboy with a black hat, tiny stick figure legs and a huge muscled upper body, scratching the back of his head. That is all.

 

Oh crap by posting this I'm making it difficult for other forum-goers to verify. What a Catch-22!

 

Well now I have to check for myself.

 

Edit: Hey, you're kinda right!

Edited September 8, 2013 by Johnny Driggs

[coaxmetal]

wow it totally does. Makoto is pretty cool. Also i'm again ruining the preview image by posting. Anyway, I think at 0:26:45, they start talking about the endings of games that aren't the last of us. Choosing the end of a potential spoilery thing is hard, because there is good discussion there. Also there was a weird balance of talking about the last of us explicitly enough to refer to and spoil things, but no really explicit story callbacks. They said enough though that, having finished it, I wouldn't want to have spoiled I think.Anyway im not like super confident about that as the ending but that seems reasonable to me without cutting out tooo much discussion

[Badfinger]

Did I say August at the opening of the episode?

You did, which I thought was funny, doubly so because with the amount of fussing that sometimes can be heard during Episode Start Mode no one corrected it. Not intended as criticism, just saying if you have some kind of deadlines you have to meet, you have a month less than you thought!

[clyde]

Regarding being cautious about talking about well-known games:

Drama Beans, which is a website that does summary and ocasional criticism of korean dramas, has a scoring system which is interesting to me. The first number represents how much they enjoyed watching the show; the second number is how "good" they think the show was. So if they enjoyed watching the show, but thought that it was genre-excrement, they might give it a 9/2.

Let me be clear: I am not at all suggesting that Idle Thumbs adopt a scoring system. The reason I bring up Drama Bean's technique is because I think it is an effort to address this issue of wanting to feel free to discuss media subjectively and also attempt to do so in a more objective, categorical way.

They have imbedded a rhetoric within their scoring system that says "As a reviewer, I am many things and those things may contradict."

It's not a solution, I just wanted to express that it's an interesting problem.

Also, Shammack:

I'm staring at the Colonel's head, assuming that there is something raunchy in the negative space, but I'm not seeing it.

[shammack]

Also, Shammack:

I'm staring at the Colonel's head, assuming that there is something raunchy in the negative space, but I'm not seeing it.

 

There's nothing raunchy. His bolo tie just makes him look like a stick figure with a huge head!

[clyde]

There's nothing raunchy. His bolo tie just makes him look like a stick figure with a huge head!

We aren't looking hard enough.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0131350382/ref=pd_aw_sbs_1?pi=SL500_SY115

 

 

Edit:

Now that I'm home and trying to do a proper search so that I can enlighten you all to the magic which is this book, I find that there isn't much information on the internet (I forget that the internet has different info banks than large libraries.) So here is the a summary of the awesomeness. This guy, Wilson Bryan Key was a professor or something and he took a class of his students to a Howard Johnson's which (I guess) had a restaurant. After looking at the menu, most of the students ended up ordering the clam-plate. This caused discussion which resulted in the discovery that the people who ordered the clam-plate didn't actually like clams. So imagine this most eventful dinner: the professor and the students examine the picture of the clam-plate on the menu until they discover that the fried clams depict an orgy... that includes a donkey.

From what I understand, this discovery was part of the paranoia in the 80's that we were all being brainwashed by extremely subtle subliminal messaging in advertising. Wilson Bryan Key toured universities, preaching this stuff. I just assumed that it would be common knowledge on the internet because I'm soliptic.

 

[Problem Machine]

Do you really need something sexier than the benign smiling face of Colonel Sanders?

[thestalkinghead]

We aren't looking hard enough.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0131350382/ref=pd_aw_sbs_1?pi=SL500_SY115

 

 

Edit:

Now that I'm home and trying to do a proper search so that I can enlighten you all to the magic which is this book, I find that there isn't much information on the internet (I forget that the internet has different info banks than large libraries.) So here is the a summary of the awesomeness. This guy, Wilson Bryan Key was a professor or something and he took a class of his students to a Howard Johnson's which (I guess) had a restaurant. After looking at the menu, most of the students ended up ordering the clam-plate. This caused discussion which resulted in the discovery that the people who ordered the clam-plate didn't actually like clams. So imagine this most eventful dinner: the professor and the students examine the picture of the clam-plate on the menu until they discover that the fried clams depict an orgy... that includes a donkey.

From what I understand, this discovery was part of the paranoia in the 80's that we were all being brainwashed by extremely subtle subliminal messaging in advertising. Wilson Bryan Key toured universities, preaching this stuff. I just assumed that it would be common knowledge on the internet because I'm soliptic.

 

 

is soliptic similar to solipsism? because that is an interesting word i learnt recently, because i think i am sort of soliptic 

[clyde]

is soliptic similar to solipsism? because that is an interesting word i learnt recently, because i think i am sort of soliptic 

Neat video. This guy is an impressive orator. At any given moment, he seems to know what express that he is aware of what he is saying even though it is (I assume) memorized. His reporter-intonation drives me nuts, but he is obviously skilled.

Yeah, a soliptic is someone who suffers (or profits from!) their own solipsism. I was using it as hyperbole, I haven't been diagnosed or anything. But I'm happy for you (and simultaneously saddened in my pity) that you have discovered the concept of solipsism and have given it some thought. It's a potentially very deep rabbit-hole which flavors a lot of my personal philosophies. If you start worrying that you are becoming a nihilistic sociopath, read D.T. Suzuki's The Beginner's Mind , he will hook you up. I suspect that we all tend towards solipsism. It's a great thing to remind yourself of, but a shitty reason to be an asshole.

 

[thestalkinghead]

yeah i have given the concept of solipsism years of thought, but never knew what it was called or that it was a thing (it is why the Matrix is one of my favorite films, i used to call solipsism "like the matrix") and it is why i consider myself an agnostic not an atheist, but i don't take it too seriously because it could definitely drive you crazy not believing in anything, i mean who cares if i am just a brain in a jar having experiments done on me, or a being of pure consciousness that made up my reality, i may as well just live in the "real" world and enjoy it

[clyde]

yeah i have given the concept of solipsism years of thought, but never knew what it was called or that it was a thing (it is why the Matrix is one of my favorite films, i used to call solipsism "like the matrix") and it is why i consider myself an agnostic not an atheist, but i don't take it too seriously because it could definitely drive you crazy not believing in anything, i mean who cares if i am just a brain in a jar having experiments done on me, or a being of pure consciousness that made up my reality, i may as well just live in the "real" world and enjoy it

Word.

In elementary school, I often considered that everyone around me might be a robot, programmed to not talk about being a robot.

[thestalkinghead]

Word.

In elementary school, I often considered that everyone around me might be a robot, programmed to not talk about being a robot.

that is what robots would say to make me think they aren't robots, robot 

[Patrick R]

Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.

[Zeusthecat]

So are you telling me that bullets only exist in my head? And that a bullet would only make me dead because my mind makes it real? (Big setup here) Does that mean that I could dodge bullets?

[jeremywc]

No. We're trying to tell you that when you're ready... you won't have to.