Chris

Idle Thumbs 168: I Like the Hair

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Idle Thumbs 168:

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I Like the Hair

A podcast teaches,

But never ceases

To deliver speeches,

Sweet as peaches,

And soft as cheeses.

A podcast reaches,

While on the beaches

Or on the creases,

When eating pizzas,

With your nieces,

Like pyschokinesis,

In bits and pieces,

A podcast thesis

For your earses.

*Fart sound*

Games Discussed: The International, Destiny, Divinity: Original Sin, Feaster's Queest

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I feel like a lot of the recent podcast titles could double as chapter titles in a book written from the perspective of a serial killer.

 

Wilson's Ghoulish Countenance
The Seed of a Sneeze
The Eyes of Luigi
KeLo. Is. Here (just for the weirdness of it)
Cuberpunk Cop-Killer
And That's Why Skeletons Fart That Way
I Like the Hair
Cavorting Amongst the Corpsees
The Satisfaction of a Job Well Done (not by itself, but with all the others)

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Jake: The Wii U browser is great solely because you can scroll through pages by holding down both triggers and tilting the gamepad. When Earthbound went on VC, they released the entire strategy guide that came packed in with the original as a PDF optimized for the Wii U browser. It's rad.

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The file Jake was talking about has got to be Idle Thumbs Episode 150...right...?

It is not

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I am excited to see Destiny and Divinity in the Games Discussed section. I'm only 15-20 minutes in so far. I did laugh at the intro!

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ViCi's Press Conference had the charm of China's 1970's Communist Party National Congress Meetings. I am that old, to know about them.

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I feel like a lot of the recent podcast titles could double as chapter titles in a book written from the perspective of a serial killer.

 

Wilson's Ghoulish Countenance

The Seed of a Sneeze

The Eyes of Luigi

KeLo. Is. Here (just for the weirdness of it)

Cuberpunk Cop-Killer

And That's Why Skeletons Fart That Way

I Like the Hair

Cavorting Amongst the Corpsees

The Satisfaction of a Job Well Done (not by itself, but with all the others)

 

Idle Thumbs, the Novelization.

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Please have Jake do all of the animal sounds for Firewatch, thanks.

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I have to say that I knew the Estevez/Sheen thing when I was like 7...probably the first bit of celebrity crap I ever knew.  Loved that Chris somehow had never heard that.

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It was great to hear Jake say something like "Grand Admiral Thrawn, raid wizard" with no sense of shame. What a cast!

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... as for Bioshock Infinite: it would be a great 5-page Science Fiction short story (if Robert A. Heinlein did not have already written 'All You Zombies' ca 1960, that is), but the market (or 2K? or Levine?) demanded "pew pew" again.

 

Wolfenstein: The New Order does world building, fiction, storytelling, coherent enemies, AND shooting far better in a technical, mechanical, artistic and design sense. And it beats the oh so ambitious Spec Ops: The Line too. This game also made me WANT TO SHOOT (Nazis) again. It gave you an incentive. It is still limited to mostly 'shooting', in its repetitive sense, but you get through it with a motivation.

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I'm glad I didn't read the "games discussed:" before listening so Feaster's Queest was a wonderfully dumb surprise. What a weird game Fester's Quest was, and weird is also the way I got to play it as a kid: My friend found a plastic bag from a roadside forest with damaged NES games inside. I think Fester's Quest was the only game that still worked and even it had a crack in its cartridge plastic.

 

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I'm only about 30 minutes into the episode, but I cannot imagine the Thumbs enjoyed Divinity. 

 

What Chris was saying about Destiny's imprecision was really interesting, and immediately reminded me of Guild Wars 2, which does very similar things, but I think they solved a lot of the problems. The main thing that addresses Chris's issue is they capped stats basically at launch. It's extremely easy to hit the cap, but new updates add skins for everything, so a characters appearance is a guide to their badassitude as well as history. 

 

Characters (and gear) auto-scale to zone level, and there is a constant cycle of events with rewards that are usable at all levels. i.e. a kind of currency, gear dropped is matched to your max level. there are large scale boss fights that yield rare materials you need to make the best weapons. 

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Level capped in the Destiny Beta yesterday and the thing that detracts massivly for me, as was touched on by the cast, is the story, or lack there of. Bungie are so good at creating interesting worlds, but there are barely a couple of generic story beats in the whole beta. Its possible they are holding something back, but once you are revived by the Guilty Spark type Dink-bot (despite apparently being dead 'a long time', its never mentioned again in the first 4 hours). There is a quick cut scene with the Speaker and thats it for the whole thing.

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Speaking of Slate podcasts, the Double X Gabfest (their feminist cast) spent a third of the episode this week discussing a video game. 

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It was great to hear Jake say something like "Grand Admiral Thrawn, raid wizard" with no sense of shame. What a cast!

 

And he's totally right, Joruus C'baoth truly is an epic space sorcerer on that cover.

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Deep cut info about Feaster's Queest.

 

The joke, in classic Jake form, triple-ruined me because a) it played perfectly into the absurd-and-backwards-in-the-service-of-unneccessary-rhyming nature of Reece's Pieces B) it was a reference to a game I hadn't thought of in twenty years and c) this is the big one -- my best friend Adam had a longtime roommate (and still a mutual friend) named Feaster (Ryan Feaster, although in seven years I've never called him Ryan) (and Jake knows this/has met him). Feaster is a man with like, signature moves. Blacking out at 4pm on a Saturday.  Doing this crazy tongue-waggle when he gets jazzed up about something.  Anyway, I laughed about Feaster's Queest for about eight hours after the cast.

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Great episode, I absolutely loved that introduction. But Sean, dude, YER SPANISH STILL SUCKS. "Esta hoy?" I think you just mean "Hoy" or "Hoy mismo." I mean this in a friendly way, not in a mean-spirited way, btw.

 

But yeah, ya goofed.Seanaman.  :earl:

 

Also, I loved how Chris got a bit New York at 4:39. "THA TEAM THAT FUCKIN' WON"

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I agree with a lot of what is said in this thread and in the Destiny thread about the game. I played the game exclusively co-op with my friend, and I have like, the tiniest experience with Halo and Halo multiplayer. I would not want to play it solo, or at least, the beta content did not particularly inspire me to want to explore it slowly by myself. It seemed like a lot of the same sort of thing, but as I went up in levels, the enemies, who looked the same, just had a larger number by their name and did more damage. I think that Chris could definitely find co-op people, considering he hosts a podcast listened to by people who would absolutely love to partner up for a bit. I mean, judging by how quickly people came to Olly and Sean's aid in the Most Dangerous Game, I think that if Chris wanted, he could find people at any hour of the day to play with, and I hope he gets a chance to, considering it's kind of fun to play with people, since it changes the strategy significantly from take a shot / take cover / take a shot. There were quite a few "boss" fights where my buddy and I spread out to force the enemies to have to split their attention, exposing them. Pretty neat. HOWEVER, maybe Chris wants to play against people he "knows in real life." WHICH IS FINE, AND THEN YEAH, PROBABLY TOUGH.

 

I think that the problem for me then, is, I have a very small amount of time I can devote to playing video games in a given week. If I don't play the game with the frequency of my buddies, they're not going to have any interest in playing co-op my low-level ass as they move through at a different pace. My buddy asked if I were going to purchase Destiny from having played the beta for some hours, and I think I'm still holding off because it just didn't seem varied enough in what they showed. What a weird way to show off your game - with one area you return to to complete the same things over and over again. Weird. 

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I think that the problem for me then, is, I have a very small amount of time I can devote to playing video games in a given week. If I don't play the game with the frequency of my buddies, they're not going to have any interest in playing co-op my low-level ass as they move through at a different pace.

I mean this is actually the exact same situation I'm in. Having a bunch of theoretical people who would be willing to play the game doesn't really change the amount of time I have or the ways that I am drawn to spending that time. It's a bummer.

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