Jake

Idle Thumbs 188: A Refined Baby

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Hm, that works. I'd assumed the joke more in an amusingly specious answer: You can't bite your ear because you can't reach it, therefore you stand on a chair. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps logic.

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Hm, that works. I'd assumed the joke more in an amusingly specious answer: You can't bite your ear because you can't reach it, therefore you stand on a chair. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps logic.

This is exactly what I thought and I didn't even give it a second thought until everyone got all confused.

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We moved into a house when I was 5 years old, and in the closet of my bedroom there was a stack of Highlights magazines, probably five years worth from the 70s.  They once published this joke, which I later learned was lifted from Gilligan's Island.

 

A man goes to the doctor and says "Doctor, doctor - i've bitten off my own ear!"

The doctor asks - bemused "how did you do that?"

The man says: "I stood on a chair!"

 

So that was pretty good I guess.

I think I must be a terrible person because as soon as I pictured the stack of Highlights I thought to myself "What if the person who left those behind just stuck a playboy somewhere in the middle?". No parent is gonna bother looking at them all individually.

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So I'm playing through Tropical Freeze right now, and I'm really struggling to see why Danielle rated this so highly. That's not to say I'm struggling to see why Danielle liked it, it's an animal-themed platformer a really solid game with a lot of creativity and personality*, but it's not particularly ambitious.

 

Also there was a bramble level, and it was an appropriate difficulty based on the levels around it! THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE DONKEY KONG, RETRO

 

* I really like that this game has decided that the Kongs are simple creatures that tend to leave a trail of destruction in their wake, even when they're the heroes. It opens up the Kongs to be used in other contexts, like Donkey Kong Adventures: Geopolitical Negotiations

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Hm, that works. I'd assumed the joke more in an amusingly specious answer: You can't bite your ear because you can't reach it, therefore you stand on a chair. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps logic.

This is what I thought too.

I'm definitely on the same page as Junior Mints and Scoops with respect to the kind of lackluster year for big games and stuff. My GOTY list has one AAA game in the top 10, and in fact only one AAA game in the top 35 (the one that's at #10!). Out of the rest of the games on the list, only Transistor, NEO Scavenger, The Floor is Jelly, and Broken Age (and maybe KR0) are games that take more than an hour or two, max, to play.

A small part of this is not having played some of the other options - I don't think my computer can quite handle the latest Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 4, and Wolfenstein, and I definitely don't have 4,000 hours to work my way through Dragon Age: Nobody Expects the Spanish, I haven't gotten around to trying Shadows of Lord of the Rings, and I'm too scared to play Alien: Isolation.

But at the same time, these are the sort of excuses that I can only really pull out because the AAA releases this year weren't so off-the-heezy that I had to find some way to play a bunch of them, and even on the indie side, as Danielle and Patrick point out, we didn't have the bevy of medium-length heavy hitters like Gone Home, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, etc. Not that I mind - in fact, with the relatively scant time I have to play games these days, it's really nice to be able to play something like Curtain or Bernband or Jazzpunk or Universal History of Light and be done in a couple hours or even a couple minutes.

Games as poems as opposed to novels is an area that got a lot more exploration this year than it has in the past, for me, especially when it comes to games as KICKASS poems as opposed to "eh this is okay."

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