Jake

Idle Thumbs 185: Beppo's Hole

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Listening to the podcast again, I really love the analogy of #GamerGate as a civil war fought after a successful war against an invader. Historically, it happens more often than not that the war only glossed over divisions between the victorious allies, and what better way to resolve said divisions than with the arms just laid aside? Especially in the case of the Persian invasion of Greece and the Hunnic invasion of the Roman Empire, the invader tends to get invited back by the losing side in the ensuing civil war. The question is whether Jack Thompson is the Darius II to #GamerGate's Sparta or the Huns to their Roman Empire?

It's bad enough that GamerGate unironically attributes themselves to historical moments but come on Gor!

 

Edit - Tegan is pretty much spot on with the breeding info. And all the info. Pokemon is very much one of those games that has a face presentation and pick-up-ability to the most carefree, casual (ugh) of players. But if you sit down and even just ask of one mechanic, "So how does this REALLY work," yeah, Beppo's Hole.

 

I'm not quite as dedicated to the series myself but I still love it. Pokemon Blue (1st gen), Emerald (special edition of 3rd gen), and Y (6th/most recent gen) have all been the biggest ones for me. I tried played the 4th and 5th gen, but not having people around made it not fun and I quickly sold them back to Gamestop. I think it's a series that you can skip some generations (which are spaced out by a couple / few years each anyway) and just come back to after a long time and be caught up in it again. Staying 100% up to date is going to make it feel like a chore probably.

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Listening to the podcast again, I really love the analogy of #GamerGate as a civil war fought after a successful war against an invader. Historically, it happens more often than not that the war only glossed over divisions between the victorious allies, and what better way to resolve said divisions than with the arms just laid aside? Especially in the case of the Persian invasion of Greece and the Hunnic invasion of the Roman Empire, the invader tends to get invited back by the losing side in the ensuing civil war. The question is whether Jack Thompson is the Darius II to #GamerGate's Sparta or the Huns to their Roman Empire?

 

Yeah, I found the analogy quite apt as well. It's something that's been rattling around my mind for a while. And, like Nick, I'm having to re-evaluate my sentiments from 8(?) years ago when that whole Jack Thompson thing was happening.

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I mentioned this on FC4 thread a long time ago, but the villain's outlandish appearance to me references a lot of Hong Kong/Japanese triad action stuff. Who has blonde hair and a purple suit? 

 (sidebar: all around cool cat(the theme he wrote for Electric Dragon 80,000v) in Ichi the Killer, which was a popular and influential movie. I can't help but think this specifically was a big influence, though that garishness isn't uncommon in different ways in those movies. Granted, that could also be giving them more credit than deserved. 

 

 

Kikihara in Ichi:

Koroshiya_1_032.jpg

 

The Judge & goon from Full Contact:

500px-FullC_53.jpgfullcontact002.jpg

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Surprised this hasn't been mentioned, re: Sean's (?) old man "Monster in my Pocket". Pokemon are POcKEt MONsters, using the common Japanese style abbreviation of taking the first syllable or two from each word (For instance, McDonalds -> MacuDo).

 

Also, from my knowledge of spanish, I would assume that "buca", like "boca" would be translated more typically as "mouth" than "hole", but I know nothing about Italian per se.

 

Re: Taylor Swift, more than a purity thing, I think there's a potentially ugly racial element regarding how the industry and public is consuming her album. She isn't the anti-Katy Perry, she's the anti-Iggy Azalea, and, judging by current radio play, arguably even an anti-Meghan Trainor ("All About That Bass" internalizes a lot more hip-hop stylings while also being somewhat more explicitly sexual than Swift's singles).

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I had never heard of this Beppo business before; I am not at all surprised to find that there is one in Times Square and nowhere else around here. Come to NYC, "home to nearly one thousand of the finest and most diverse haute cuisine restaurants in the world, according to Michelin," but find comfort in the mid-tier chain restaurant that you recognize from your hometown.

 

Those places can come in handy when you have large groups that need to be accommodated on short notice. I have good memories of swarming Dallas BBQs with people from Something Awful, getting humongous frozen cocktails and bad food. 

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Everything about Pokémon is FASCINATING. And I've never played a single minute of it.

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hoooooooly shit, Teg.

 

I feel so out-of-it when it comes to Pokemon now.

 

From what I understand, breeding has had hidden depth to it from its first implementation in Silver/Gold.

 

I might peek back in on Pokémon, but it depends heavily on the answer to this question: How easy is it to get my hands on a couple Meowths and then fill my entire PC storage with their offspring?

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Toad sounds:

 

Hahaha! My dog was so baffled by these sounds, and seemed genuinely concerned for my speaker.

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Ill post!

 

Swift also occupies that rarefied space of a person still capable of selling enterprise level units, so the difference in Spotify's paltry royalties and people downloading it are negligible to her. She's also maybe one of the few who could negotiate a more favorable rate, and this is a good tactic for that.

 

As for the other stuff, I'm not sure I agree, but it's such a morass I'm not sure. I can't tell we're seeing the ceiling come down a lot or if the floor coming up a little. I feel like there are more Parquet Courts in the world today, medium sized bands that would never be huge making a viable go at it. I'm not sure if they would have had it better in the 90s. So many bands got signed, and it didn't get them anywhere. Like Guided by Voices, or my personal favorite unlikely signing Jim Sheppard's V3. I think they would all be better off today. GBV has their own fancy beer with record right now! Then there are all those scenes that seem to be thriving that I don't understand at all, like Imagine Dragons or all that crabcore. 

 

Yeah all of that is fair. My rant was definitely really polemical, and missing some nuance, and maybe also just like the perspective of a grumpy person getting older. In some ways things are great in terms of tools becoming easier to use, less expensive. Recording an album is much easier now than twenty years ago. But distribution channels are much more of a mess now in my opinion, and for people that aren't like super marketing savvy I feel like the current environment is a really frustrating one to operate in.

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I agree with feelthedarkness that the villain's appearance in Far Cry 4 definitely seems to be utilizing some Asian cinema tropes. I think the Thumbs point about Ubisoft's weird approach to marketing the Far Cry games still stands though.

 

Also, while thinking about parallels between cinema and the Far Cry games, I think game 3 and on are kind of disappointing in the same way I find it disappointing when schlocky horror films switch from being unintentionally bad to self-consciously bad with lots of winks to the audience. Like in Far Cry 2 lots of absurd events would happen, but it was all happening in a setting that had a fairly grounded tone, but since then the tone has been all, "yeah brah, you're gonna jump off a hang glider and punch a shark in the face! Let the dubstep wobble!" That shift is really unappealing to me, although it seems like the series has gotten much more popular since that shift in tone happened so I don't think it's ever going to revert back unfortunately.

 

Also, all the animal violence in the games grosses me out too. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on with that attitude because it isn't something that necessarily bothers me (I've caused my fair share of stress to the chickens in Zelda games), and I think it's just the way murdering animals is tied into a crafting system. Because the crafting system is so nonsensical (this is how you get a larger wallet? Okay dude) it always seems like I'm imagining design meetings where developers are trying to figure out how you reward the player for killing these creatures because it seems like a "feature" they should have in the game, and so they come up with this crafting system. And that seems perverse.

 

And this is all frustrating because while I skipped out on FC3 without sweating it, I do kinda really want to play this game because the Himalayan setting really does look beautiful and fun to explore.

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I just finished Monument Valley (not the DLC) and I completely agree with the Thumbs assessment.  You can see the beginnings of some really interesting stuff at the end but they don't quite take it far enough.  I'll have to try out the DLC at some point because it sounds like what I want.  Also I'm glad totem guy returns.

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I might peek back in on Pokémon, but it depends heavily on the answer to this question: How easy is it to get my hands on a couple Meowths and then fill my entire PC storage with their offspring?

 

Very easy! You can just go online and trade for a Meowth.

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My personal favourite in the series is Black 2, but the servers for all the DS-era games have been shut down and I'm fairly confident that the new games are going to be a more complete experience than X/Y, the most recent games.

 

So I skipped over the Black/White gen (And Heart Gold/Soul Silver, actually), and went from Diamond to X. After completing X and deciding I wanted to bring over my Pokémon from various older games, dating back to the original Sapphire, I picked up Black 2. I'd be curious to know why it's your favourite! Perhaps it's just the way I played it (I went into it with the intention of blasting through it so that I could transfer my Pokémon from Diamond, and then dump them in Pokémon Bank, but because of how I play Pokémon I ended up changing my party around every 5 levels or so and I levelled everyone up quite thoroughly), but I came away from it kind of relieved it was over. There are probably a number of reasons for that, not least that I'd just come from Pokémon X, which has the crazy EXP Share tweaks that make levelling up much less of a chore, so keeping everyone at the same level was a pain. I did quite a lot of power-levelling using Audinos. I dunno, maybe it just wasn't the best way to play that game.

 

 

I also recommend viewing 

 -in which Korean player Se Jun Park used a team built around a weak, obscure Pokémon to take the title- to see how a clever strategy and being able to get into your opponent's head will take you further than just picking the strongest attacks.

 

This match is amazing. Competition level Pokémon blows my mind, because I know enough about the game to understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, but I also know that my brain is never going to be able to store the raw information required to do it myself. It's the thing Sean has talked about on the cast before, in relation to Dota 2.

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So I skipped over the Black/White gen (And Heart Gold/Soul Silver, actually), and went from Diamond to X. After completing X and deciding I wanted to bring over my Pokémon from various older games, dating back to the original Sapphire, I picked up Black 2. I'd be curious to know why it's your favourite! Perhaps it's just the way I played it (I went into it with the intention of blasting through it so that I could transfer my Pokémon from Diamond, and then dump them in Pokémon Bank, but because of how I play Pokémon I ended up changing my party around every 5 levels or so and I levelled everyone up quite thoroughly), but I came away from it kind of relieved it was over. There are probably a number of reasons for that, not least that I'd just come from Pokémon X, which has the crazy EXP Share tweaks that make levelling up much less of a chore, so keeping everyone at the same level was a pain. I did quite a lot of power-levelling using Audinos. I dunno, maybe it just wasn't the best way to play that game.

 

I mainly enjoyed it because it had a really good mixture of classic and new Pokémon available right off the bat (my final team was Samurott, Leavanny, Arcanine, Swoobat, Lucario, and Magnezone), a really fantastic worldmap (seasons and almost no HM requirements!) and because there was a ridiculous amount of postgame content (literally half of the map isn't accessible until after the E4). I dumped a ton of time into it, much more than I did in the first Gen V games, which I didn't particularly care for.

 

Oh, and Roxie's gym being a hole-in-the-ground nightclub with dynamic music was just the best goddamn thing.

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Okay, that makes sense! It does have a huge amount of post-game stuff in it. I didn't stop as soon as I beat the Elite 4, in spite of wanting to get back to X and mess around with all my old Pokémon, but I didn't get any further than Nacrene city, and I'm pretty sure that there are a whole bunch of the caves and isolated locations that I didn't get to. Like how are you supposed to get to Anville town? It's miles away from anywhere! So yeah, I think if I'd have played the game for what it was rather than as a stepping stone, I'd have got more out of it. And yes, Roxie's gym is ace.

 

My final team was Serperior, Musharna, Galvantula, GARBODOR, KlingKlang and Audino, which I just realised are all Gen 5.

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The talk about pricing has me super bummed. As someone who is trying to make games I have visions of trying to be truly transparent with the way I create my work, price it, and use the profits. It is a personal response to the frustration I have with the way many companies go to great lengths to hide what they do and why they do it. Hearing about the Monument Valley revolt gives me some understanding as to why they do hide everything.

At the height of Gamer Gate a lot of the supporters said they were part of a "consumer revolt" implying that they were using their power as consumers to move the production of games towards some kind of ideological purity. I wonder if those reviewing Monument Valley poorly felt the same way.

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Surprised this hasn't been mentioned, re: Sean's (?) old man "Monster in my Pocket". Pokemon are POcKEt MONsters, using the common Japanese style abbreviation of taking the first syllable or two from each word (For instance, McDonalds -> MacuDo).

It was meee! (And don't worry, I know Pokemon are Pocket Monsters and originated as that name in Japan. It wasn't totally out of the blue. I know more than I should about Pokemon because they're a huge cultural force, and are in all Smash Bros games, but I have never actually played a proper Pokemon game.)

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Apparently Nintendo really doesn't like people referring to Pokémon as Pocket Monsters ever since the Monster in My Pocket guys tried to sue them.

 

 

Okay, that makes sense! It does have a huge amount of post-game stuff in it. I didn't stop as soon as I beat the Elite 4, in spite of wanting to get back to X and mess around with all my old Pokémon, but I didn't get any further than Nacrene city, and I'm pretty sure that there are a whole bunch of the caves and isolated locations that I didn't get to. Like how are you supposed to get to Anville town? It's miles away from anywhere! So yeah, I think if I'd have played the game for what it was rather than as a stepping stone, I'd have got more out of it. And yes, Roxie's gym is ace.

 

My final team was Serperior, Musharna, Galvantula, GARBODOR, KlingKlang and Audino, which I just realised are all Gen 5.

 

You get to Anville Town by riding the subway from Nimbasa City! There's not much of interest there though.

 

I always wanted to put Galvantula on a team. Gen V had the best bugs.

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It was meee! (And don't worry, I know Pokemon are Pocket Monsters and originated as that name in Japan. It wasn't totally out of the blue. I know more than I should about Pokemon because they're a huge cultural force, and are in all Smash Bros games, but I have never actually played a proper Pokemon game.)

All you white people look the same to me.

 

I'm basically the same way. I was too old when the first wave hit, so the first Pokemon I ever played was Pokemon X this year, which I only really played because I got it for more or less free in a promotion. It's fairly charming.

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Oh geez, those Yoshi sound effects. I would be okay with the cast just having fun and making funny noises, but NONE OF THAT sounds anything like Yoshi D:

The toad sounds from Danielle sounded pretty spot-on though!

 

Also the best Pokemon game to start with is whichever came out most recently! So grab Omega Ruby or Alpha Sapphire (don't get both unless you hate money) and be prepared for TOO MUCH WATER.

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If people are outraged by the $2 for 8 new levels of Monument Valley, I wonder what they think of the $3 macchiato I drank this morning (I think both were exquisite).

 

Coincidentally, this is a loose metric of mine for deciding on whether to impulse buy an ios title I'm vaguely interested in but on the fence about. I don't go out and get fancy coffee that often, but when I do it tends to run to $5-$6 because I take it with soy, so if a game comes in under that I'll often take a chance on it, but something that comes in at $8 has a much harder time ending up on my phone.

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