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Idle Thumbs 172: http://malaise.ennui/

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Idle Thumbs 172:

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http://malaise.ennui/

Pleased to present this podcast to placate the people that prefer Thumbs... Pleased. Thanks. Past the part that permeates the pod (the Playable Teaser) presenters take polite turns pontificating, talking, pushing their played titles. Parse this peculiar transmission, permitting the playful talkers' preposterous tiresome palaver.

Things Discussed: P.T., Silent Hill 4, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill, Probability 0, Lovely Planet, Zombies Ate My Neighbors

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Recently I've been thinking that I'm generally too negative on the Interwebs, not just in opinion, but also just in general tone and I think I can see it others as well.

 

There was a study a few months ago which looked at emotional contagions on a massive scale in social networks. The study was looking at how rain affects the emotional content of status messages, and how those who view the negative status messages show a similar shift in the emotional content of their status messages even though they were not subject to the weather at all. They went on to show how emotions propagate through social networks like a contagion and went onto suggest that social networks increase the synchronicity of global emotions.

 

The thing that struck me was how the people several steps down the chain were still measurably afflicted by the negative emotions of a person they had never met from weather they never experienced. Just a friend of a friend of friend had a bad day and a portion of that day was inherited by a swath of others.

 

It feels a bit weird knowing that your emotions, as conveyed by writing, can have a material impact on how a stranger, who never even read what you wrote, feels.

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It's worth noting that Kojima announced a cardboard box with a bikini babe on it literal minutes before P.T. was unveiled.

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Wow, I came here for the brilliant title, and then there's the description. Can't wait to hear you talk about all the Silent Hills!

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How to remember the difference between the Paul Andersons: "T" stands for "Talent", "WS" stands for "What Script?"

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After next to no inner turmoil i have finally decided. The question no one asked. Who is your favourite thumb... fucking Nick Breckon of course!

 

post-27841-0-01738300-1408625089.jpg               post-27841-0-70139000-1408625098.jpg

 

Vote Nick

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Regarding Nick's story about the baad kid who played PC games: some of my first exposure to games when I was growing up was in the time when Pokémon hit the west. It was surrounded by controversy from media watchdog groups and the Pokémon games and cards were banned in my school for being too distracting, so trades and battles went on under the table. What I'm getting at is that I happened to learn about games at the exact moment that video games were analogous to drugs.

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It's worth noting that Kojima announced a cardboard box with a bikini babe on it literal minutes before P.T. was unveiled.

 

Mhm. (Reposted from the PT thread on that topic and my concern of Kojima's involvement):

 

I feel the same, though I'd argue old, pre-MGS4 Kojima games did have a very specific tone that he'd hit constantly. The problem now is that Kojima wants to tell dark, grimy stories about genocide, civil warfare, racism, sexual assault, torture, filled to the brim with Guantanamo Bay references, and Sacco and Vanzetti allusions...while also having the game feature a Voldemort looking ass villain called SKULLFACE, poop jokes, wacky easter eggs, campy lines ("They played us like a GODDAMN FIDDLE"), and zany cardboard box shenanigans featuring naked swimsuit model sprays. Like, Kojima has always been insidiously sexist and fucking stupid, but once MGS4 and then MGS: GZ came out, it stopped being cute and playful, and became plain offensive and shameless. I find it hard to trust this kind of guy to tackle this specific series. Jack de Quidt said it best:

 

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I also cannot believe that Del Toro sees something in Kojima. They couldn't be more polar opposites in what they produce. Del Toro's thing (and why I adore the man) is to find beauty and majesty within genre tropes and classical horror/monster movie archetypes, and then humanize them and the narrative to the point that we empathize with these creatures and misfits that we've been trained to fear in other films, with no irony or cynicism involved. Kojima uses genre tropes and pulp to instill preachy (yet often important) messages and obnoxious (yet often effective) satire. He revels in camp, but isn't detached enough to honestly dissect and analyze the problems inherent in that camp, and that'd be FINE if he weren't mixing that camp shit with the aforementioned themes I just listed now. Also: NANOMACHINES.

 

Here's hoping Del Toro can smack some sense into Kojima's head while making Silent Hills. Knowing how much of a movie nerd Kojima is, he's bound to listen.

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PT talk was interesting. Isn't Silent Hill 4 the one that's most similar to this demo, in that there are first person sections when you're trapped in your apartment? That's what PT made me think most of when I found out it was a SH thing. Shattered Memories feels similar to me in retrospect because the game took place entirely over-the-shoulder using a flashlight to look around. At one point you wander through a dark forest in a snow storm and it might as well be 1st person. There's also actual first person perspective when you talk to the psychiatrist, but you don't have a lot of control in those sections. With those precedents and the current popular model for horror, I feel like a part first person, part third person campaign could make for an interesting game. It could also help to break up the tension inherent to navigating a horror game in first person. Team Silent games have always been unique, even from the beginning where clunky combat actually made avoiding enemies a natural choice without having to resort to the blunt solution of removing combat entirely. I hope Silent Hills ends up doing something new as well.

After next to no inner turmoil i have finally decided. The question no one asked. Who is your favourite thumb... fucking Nick Breckon of course!

 

attachicon.gifinb.jpg               attachicon.gifinb2.jpg

 

Vote Nick

Cosigned.

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Completely self-indulgent nostalgia:

 

Herc's Adventures! I have a friend whose dad at some point (I guess during our mid-teens, and well after it was at all relevant) got him a dodgy chipped PlayStation and a whole ton of pirated games. Our favourite of all of them was Herc's Adventures. He generally played Herc and I generally played Jason, but sometimes I played Atlanta instead. You'd wander around an open world collecting items for various gods. When you met said gods the game would freeze your character sprites and overlay an FMV animation over the top-right of the screen, but since his copy was a shitty CD-R the video frequently got corrupted. Sometimes the visuals would freeze and the audio would run to the end, but others it would just freeze up completely and we wouldn't be able to progress at all, sometimes after hours of play.

 

It had a cool death mechanic wherein every time a character died they'd be sent to Hades and they'd have to fight their way out. Each subsequent time you'd start a little deeper, having to fight through an additional section to regain your life, until eventually, if I remember correctly, it'd put you into an inescapable area. Or perhaps the game just ended. I don't fully recall. I also think there was a portion of the game where you actually entered into Hades voluntarily, and had to go through the whole sequence from the deepest stage all the way to the top, and I have a feeling that put you back at the very start of the game, which I found weirdly effective.

 

In fact, I found the whole continuous open world thing quite effective in general. It's not at all uncommon now, but I still think it was well pulled-off; particularly that even the exit to the underworld connected with a specific point on the main map. I guess I find that a weird and fascinating idea in general – that there's some specific place with a relatively inconspicuous doorway to the underworld. I'm rambling.

 

The presentation of the game in general was super wacky and cartoony, which doesn't appeal to me in particular, and there were some pretty annoying repetitive low-quality voice samples. I don't think we ever finished it, but towards the end of the game you went to Egypt and it was full of aliens and UFOs and all that nonsense.

 

I don't know if that game was any good at all, but I had a really good time with it. We kept coming back to it for a few years, even.

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 It was surrounded by controversy from media watchdog groups and the Pokémon games and cards were banned in my school for being too distracting, so trades and battles went on under the table. 

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I'm just now listening but I fucking loved Chris', "Awww Kojima, come on!" when hearing about PT, and then Nick and Jake both start into the shit that annoyed me about it. I had the same reaction when I was seeing through the presentation layer.

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Regarding Nick's story about the baad kid who played PC games: some of my first exposure to games when I was growing up was in the time when Pokémon hit the west. It was surrounded by controversy from media watchdog groups and the Pokémon games and cards were banned in my school for being too distracting, so trades and battles went on under the table. What I'm getting at is that I happened to learn about games at the exact moment that video games were analogous to drugs.

 

When I was in primary school there was a scandal among our class when a teacher got so frustrated with people getting distracted by the Pokémon collectible cards she grabbed one off a kid and ripped it in two. Everyone was shocked.

 

Luckily it was just a Butterfree, so he didn't lose much.

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When I was in primary school there was a scandal among our class when a teacher got so frustrated with people getting distracted by the Pokémon collectible cards she grabbed one off a kid and ripped it in two. Everyone was shocked.

 

Luckily it was just a Butterfree, so he didn't lose much.

 

I read this too quickly and missed the word "off" so I thought you said she grabbed a kid and ripped in it two.  That would be quite shocking indeed.

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I read this too quickly and missed the word "off" so I thought you said she grabbed a kid and ripped in it two.  That would be quite shocking indeed.

 

Oh yeah, that did happen too.

 

Our teacher was a big dog. (she travelled back in time)

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There was one incident where another kid got me to hold onto his cards because I wasn't into Pokémon at the time and thus wouldn't have my desk searched and get them confiscated like he would. He gave me a Machoke card in exchange for the favour.

 

So yeah, pretty much exactly like drugs.

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I hate to recycle a post I made elsewhere on the same forum but I am interested if, at all, any of the Thumbs have anything to bounce off of this. The tl;dr being scary games as a genre / theme and their value or success of execution.

 

 

Maybe it's a thrill thing. I don't personally care to be scared, but also don't mind / care if other people desire it. It's just not for me. On top of that though, it is really difficult for me to consume media and be scared as part of the experience. I've looked into video games too much to be scared by them, because I'm just reading the Matrix. "Where's the trigger volume" type shit. And it's the same with films / television (I have some amateur education in production). And in both cases it's that writing has gotten predictable with creating fear.

 

- show something gross

- show something abrupt / sudden

 

I actually give Don't Starve a lot of credit for its presentation of fear / paranoia, via its sanity system. If anyone hasn't played it still, as your sanity decays the game's presentation changes over time, to the eventual point of the game world changing. It starts off with seeing shadows dash about at the edge of your vision, which is a really delicate, masterful stroke. It isn't just playing on the character in the game-world, it kinda plays on you. "What the fuck was that?"

 

That said it didn't terrify me, and I wasn't seeking it, but the presentation was something different than what game tend to do. Like was discussed in the latest episode of Idle Thumbs, the Silent Hills PT felt like a haunted house structured thing, which to me is just cheesy, predictable, and ineffective. I guess part of me is dead or I'm flawed as a person. I just hate that this was the direction being taken because I do enjoy the Silent Hill series. It was less about being terrified and more about the mystery of what is going on exactly.

I do want to note with a lot of emphasis again that I don't question or put down anyone that are into being scared and such. That mechanism is just broken for me, or something.

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I totally played Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior way too early. My parents never really took an interest in what I was playing until GTA vice city came out around the same time we found out about my older brothers drug problem. Only game I was ever told not to get or play. 

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"We are trying to weaponize the ghosts!"

That was great. What weird fictional military wouldn't want to weaponize the ghosts?

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