Jake

Idle Thumbs 175: It's an Itchio

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Idle Thumbs 176:

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It's an Itchio

You wonder what your destiny may be but stop; that's not important now. With focus you will master this. With precise, uninterrupted attention you will ascend higher than you ever have before. You will see the two thousandth course. You will diffuse the bomb. And you will master the lore of the blade. But then things shift - the color changes, difficulty recedes - and you're left wondering what would have happened if you hadn't knocked over that blue vase.

Games Discussed: Desert Golfing, Screencheat, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, SwingCopters, Curtain, Eidolon, Blades: On the Edge

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"The Dark Souls of Angry Birds" - I'm sorry but I had to pause while listening to point out that the bar has been raised on Citizen Kane.

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Chris mentioning uninstalling and reinstalling Desert Golfing as an insane tactic for obsessive players and then revealing ten minutes later that he had done just that killed me.

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Chris mentioning uninstalling and reinstalling Desert Golfing as an insane tactic for obsessive players and then revealing ten minutes later that he had done just that killed me.

Took me back to Zuma.

 

Edit - Happy birthday Chris!

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When they were having the discussion about the "Perfect Gem Activated" thing or the vase in Desert Golfing I couldn't stop thinking back to the Pendant in Dark Souls, which had a similar mystery surrounding it; an especially interesting experience considering how esoteric most of the systems in that game were.

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"31 is this magical ages where just... vmmm vmmm vmmm."

 

Happy birthday, Chris.

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I really enjoyed the discussion of the advantageous edge at high levels of perfomance being sublime. It makes me consider the possibility that those spikes are scattered about low levels of performance, they just don't stick out as much.

Also, how scary is Terror Aboard the Speedwell, I don't want to play it if it will give me nightmares or create some sort of disturbing association in my mind that will make it so something I have always enjoyed is now repulsive. I usually don't watch horror-movies or play horror-games because I'm more susceptible to these things than most folk. The fact that this is text-based may be giving me a false sense of mildness.

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Danielle mentioned Bik, but then it wasn't discussed, so I wanted to say it's a cool game! I actually reviewed it. I start off kinda bagging on it, but I like it a lot. 

 

I hate rereading things I've written later on; jesus christ what an awful review. (Also, if anyone is looking for a freelance writer, hit me up.)

 

Anyway, Bik is a tight little adventure game with good characters.

 

edit: thought I should mention that it's on various computer platforms in addition to iOS and Android.

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I love the (completely accurate) characterization of #Gamergate as being akin to "Thanks, Obama." I propose a campaign of ironic tweets blaming minor gaming-related annoyances on Zoe Quinn.

 

 

"Smash Bros. demo is Japan-only? #ThanksZobama"

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What does a pig do when he needs to see a doctor?

 

He makes an app-oink-ment.

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BEST DAD JOKES:

I'm dad's favourite is when someone burps, he says "I'm glad you brought that up"

I made this joke last week with someone :/ I am become dad

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I'm already 20 holes into Desert Golf, and a weird thought I had while playing is that it reminds me just how disruptive loading times are in a game in contrast to this, where I get the next hole and it just pass across to say "Well alright, try this one out then.". Though I guess the game still has loading, it just hides it in the brief pause between levels so I forget it exists.

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- There's a guy in the physics/astro department here who has a bunch of like, the most scientific dad-joke puns  ever. Before each colloquium, he'll pick up a little chocolate snack cake from the tray and find some poor graduate student who hasn't heard his joke, and then make it dance around in space in front of them, and smile/wink and say "Brownie-in motion". He'll also, when change comes at our weekly pub night, push two ten-cent pieces and say to anyone who will listen, "well, here's another pair-a-dime shift." 

 

- Whenever Chris talks about mastering something like, say, Desert Golfing, or Flappy Birds, or Swing Copters, I wonder how much time he puts into these games. I tend to be someone who will start playing, and then after failing for like, five to ten minutes, I'll find something else that I should be doing instead. I forced myself to play Super Hexagon just to see if I could, and while I got a little better, I had to stop, since it was infuriating to fail and fail and fail (there are a lot of people, I know, who are in the same boat). I wonder if Chris is somehow better at these games intrinsically, or if he's just got more tenacity, or what. It's always fascinating to hear Chris analyze these games in the same way as it's fun to read people deconstruct a specific level in a Super Mario game. It's interesting to think about the pure building blocks of intelligent game design.

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- There's a guy in the physics/astro department here who has a bunch of like, the most scientific dad-joke puns  ever. Before each colloquium, he'll pick up a little chocolate snack cake from the tray and find some poor graduate student who hasn't heard his joke, and then make it dance around in space in front of them, and smile/wink and say "Brownie-in motion". He'll also, when change comes at our weekly pub night, push two ten-cent pieces and say to anyone who will listen, "well, here's another pair-a-dime shift."

 

Dammit, I literally laughed out loud at those.

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Dong Nguyen shutting down Chris Remo on a forum is the goofiest thing. I'm interested to see where Chris puts QWOP on this spectrum of really minimal but difficult games. I want to say that all these balancing-act kind of games are all really the same mechanic, but to different degrees of difficulty and framed in different narratives (piloting a helicopter sounds crazier than making a guy walk) such that the player gets a different impression with each game.

 

Also happy birthday chris.

 

Next week sounds like a good episode!!!

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*raises hand* I'm a "cozy" mystery fan and got the Curtain joke.

A neat thing about Curtain is that while it isn't one of the better Poirot stories, it's probably one of Christie's most "fair play" mysteries, certainly the most explicitly so as the traditional summation scene has a lot of "didn't you notice x" where x is something that had been previously clearly noted in the text.

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BEST DAD JOKES:

I'm dad's favourite is when someone burps, he says "I'm glad you brought that up"

I made this joke last week with someone :/ I am become dad

 

 

What does a pig do when he needs to see a doctor?

 

He makes an app-oink-ment.

 

Can I seriously use this in my dad joke game? I actually lol'ed.

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I used to be a huge Agatha Christie fan, and I've read Curtain, although I remember not being particularly impressed. My favorite of hers is still Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None, though. Her detective mysteries are very well done, but are much more formulaic in the way that I find nearly all mystery novels to be*. These days I only read them if they have either a really compelling protagonist or a really compelling sense of place, or if they're genuinely outside the normal bounds in some way, like And Then There Were None is. So I've dug stuff Ken Bruen writes (because they tend to feature compelling protagonists and also often tend to have the problem at hand solved by someone other than the protagonist if at all), David Peace's really stark, raw Red Riding Quartet (paints a really upsetting picture of Yorkshire in the 70s and 80s), Eric Garcia's Rex books (because they are noir books with the utterly nutty premise that dinosaurs did not, in fact, go extinct, but rather survived by developing rubber human suits and congregated in LA; also they get high on herbs. The protagonist being a velociraptor detective with a parsley habit. I was startled to learn just now that apparently Syfy made a movie based on one of them.), etc.

 

*I am well aware that many people would suggest that genres like science fiction, fantasy and particularly my favorite subgenre, urban fantasy are also very formulaic. This is fair, but mysteries are set in the real world and I already live there, so they have to go out of their way to present me with contexts that are new and interesting to me. SF and fantasy have an automatic leg up because they by default include stuff that isn't actually part of my life experience.

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Can I seriously use this in my dad joke game? I actually lol'ed.

 

Absolutely!

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BEST DAD JOKES:

I'm dad's favourite is when someone burps, he says "I'm glad you brought that up"

I made this joke last week with someone :/ I am become dad

 

My grandfather had a similar response:

 

"Well brought up, why weren't you?"

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