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Idle Thumbs 191: Not the Greatest, but the Best

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Idle Thumbs 191:

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Not the Greatest, but the Best

We ring out the old, and ring in the new, with what may be the oldest conversation in the existence of our medium: What is the best video game of all time? Not the greatest, mind you, but the best. (Thanks to Matter magazine for sending us on this quest as part of their video game week, earlier this month.) See you in 2015!

Games Discussed: Tetris, Minecraft, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3D Land, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Spelunky, QWOP, Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto V, Dwarf Fortress, The Sims, SimCity, Mario Kart 64, Grim Fandango, Double Dragon II, Bad Dudes 2, Renegade, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Half-Life, Doom, Far Cry 2, Flappy Bird, Flappy Bird Family, Blast Corps, Full Throttle, Christmas Lemmings

Films Discussed: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

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In the episode description, do you mean Medium? Or is there really a Matter magazine?

Edit: I googled things like an adult person, and you do mean Matter and I'm a mega dope

H a p p y N e w Y e a r

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The best game of all time that would exemplify video games as a genre would have to be Super Mario Galaxy 2.  It's a game that nearly anyone can play and enjoy.  The sheer amount of creativity, variety, color and fun packed into the game is impressive.  It's a game that when you are playing you instantly know you're playing a video game and it reminds you of why you enjoy playing video games.

 

SMG2 strips all the baggage a lot of games have, no heavy story that tries to make the game a movie or book.  No simulation aspect that tries to make you forget that you're playing a game.  It's just pure mechanics, fun, and well crafted levels wearing the fact that it is a video game proudly on it's sleeve.

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Also, I'm in San Francisco for this New Year's Eve. Saying goodbye to 2014 in the City of Thumbs.

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The extra 18 minutes of this cast is just a weird pre-cast segment we recorded weeks ago about Star Wars and Indiana Jones; it was a fun chat.

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The extra 18 minutes of this cast is just a weird pre-cast segment we recorded weeks ago about Star Wars and Indiana Jones; it was a fun chat.

It actually greased the wheels really well for the Best Game discussion in hindsight. (The night we did the Greatest/Best feature was the night we accidentally recorded the movie stuff, and I'd already forgotten that).

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The best game of all time that would exemplify video games as a genre would have to be Super Mario Galaxy 2.  It's a game that nearly anyone can play and enjoy.  The sheer amount of creativity, variety, color and fun packed into the game is impressive.  It's a game that when you are playing you instantly know you're playing a video game and it reminds you of why you enjoy playing video games.

 

SMG2 strips all the baggage a lot of games have, no heavy story that tries to make the game a movie or book.  No simulation aspect that tries to make you forget that you're playing a game.  It's just pure mechanics, fun, and well crafted levels wearing the fact that it is a video game proudly on it's sleeve.

It's way uglier than Mario Galaxy 1, though, so it is removed from contention.  :shifty:  :D Also Cloud Suit Mario is a really questionable costume. Looks like he drives a white windowless cloud van. The ice skates are really really great, though, so it is probably the BGOAT.

Though I have no evidence to confirm this, I think both Chris and I had plans on "Best Game Of All Time" turning into "BGOAT" and then turning it into "Ian BGOAT" during this Best Game conversation,m but then when we went to record, it never came up. This all may exist in my head, as we never discussed such a thing, but we had a very brief conversation that went something like:

"The Game Of All Time... what's the acronym for that?"

"T-Go-At?"

"Oh the BEST Game of All Time"

"TB GOAT?"

"Best Game of All Time, what would that acronym be?"

"....."

"..."

[glint in Chris' eye]

"Lets save it for the cast."

"Yeah lets save it. Don't want to burn cast"

But I could be totally wrong here.

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SMG2 strips all the baggage a lot of games have, no heavy story that tries to make the game a movie or book.

 

A lot of my favourite games are the ones that do tell a story, but tell a story using their own mechanics rather than ones borrowed from prose or film.

 

The only example I can think of at the moment is Journey, which might be my personal BGOAT.

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I'd argue that Empire Strikes Back would land now on the basis that The Sixth Sense landed in a cultural phenomenon type way. Granted that was a while ago and a pretty different tone, but the technical mastery, and face-melting thing applies.. unbreakable even comes close just in terms of super well made.. (I haven't seen that in a while.. so I could be completely wrong.)

 

Tangentially related - but I just watched the Alien quadrilogy + Prometheus.. and the thing that blew me away was that as we moved forward through time the characters became more and more exaggerated. Alien was a group of completely normal people in a f**ked up situation (which I think made it more scary even though the actual alien (man in the suit) was really pretty ridiculous looking?), and gradually the cast became caricatures. By the time we reach Prometheus the characters are 2d ideas, but in Alien Tom Skerrit felt like YOU. He was just a guy doing his job that wanted to get back home. I don't know how that applies except in that we seem to have drifted further away from reality in our fairy tales.

 

Speaking of Indiana Jones 4 - to me the thing that made it different from the first three was the level of gloss. It just felt shinier than the original. Which is odd because I'm sure to people at the time Raiders of the Lost Arc felt like a shinier Robin Hood. Maybe Harrison Ford was a less realistic Errol Flynn.. and now maybe Chris Pratt (in Guardians of the Galaxy) is a less realistic Harrison Ford.

 

..Maybe we're just getting old?

 

Incidentally Lawrence of Arabia is my favorite movie of all time (Gone with the wind being a close second) - the mention of which is probably what got me excited enough to comment.

 

I bet if Paul Thomas Anderson made a movie with an "I am your father" moment - faces would be melted across the board.

//end rambleing

 

Happy New Year!

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Haha the part in the beginning with Jake alone made me notice how weird the meter of his voice sounds without intermittent laughter in the background.

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I for one would never give "best video game" to something that's only experienced at home.  It has to be a cabinet game.

 

There's a fundamental difference between something you experience in your (or your friend's) house, and something you experience in public, and I think the best things we do and see are the public ones.  Video games where you can actually meet strangers are best (and not where you can just meet their typing, or their disembodied voices, either).

 

Arcades weren't the best places, though, because they quickly filled up with gamers (there were gamers even in the earliest era of video games).  The best cabinets were always in other places, grocery stores or train stations or family-run pizza parlors.

 

Anyway.  Now that I've narrowed the field down to the couple dozen or so cabinet games that were widely available in normal public spaces like that...

 

...the best game would have to be a game that appeals to lots of different kinds of people, not just young males.  That rules out most of the ones about spaceships, shooting, or shooting spaceships, which is maybe too bad, because some of those were great.  It also rules out anything but the simplest controls (but then only a few cabinet games had controls that took more than a couple of quarters to learn) and fairly forgiving ones (which rules out those that required non-old-person reflexes too soon in the difficulty progression).

 

So, uh, I think I'm down to Ms. Pac-Man and Tetris.

 

And I'm going to go with Ms. Pac-Man, because I'm better at it.

 

And unlike the 'best games' the Thumbs came up with, I still actually play my 'best game' from time to time, when I happen to find a cabinet or tabletop of it in a pizza parlor or bar.

 

 # # #

 

Aside:  would we have the same problems with depictions of women in video games today, if video games were still played in cabinets in grocery stores and train stations?

 
Also, Centipede maybe should have gone on that short list.  Even though it had shooting in it.  For whatever reason, it seemed to have a noticeably higher appeal to older and/or female-er people.
 

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Darth Vader says "No, I am your father", because it is a direct reply to Luke's line; "He told me enough. He told me YOU killed him!"

 

Also Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the best of all time ever forever.

 

Also Empire Strikes Back is also the best of all time ever forever in its own way.

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I think the standard that asks you to prioritise cabinet over home games is the same standard that asks you to prioritise board games over video games. A standard that says that the best video game is the one that most resembles another medium entirely is not a standard that will lead to the pinnacle of video games.

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This conversation about film is the best. Screw video games.

 

Edit - The note about how TV shows cut to commercials; I wonder how TV broadcasts of the Star Wars movies choose to break them up with commercials now vs. how they were broken up ten, twenty years ago.

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I think the standard that asks you to prioritise cabinet over home games is the same standard that asks you to prioritise board games over video games.

 

But the question was "what is the best video game", was it not?

 

Also, only a tiny fraction of board games are commonly played in public spaces:  chess, dominoes, mancala, go, mah jong, and perhaps a dozen others with similar long cultural roots.  The rest, and the vast majority, are played in your house or your friend's house, so I'm having some trouble seeing where your comparison is coming from.

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I think it's a really fascinating question to ask "What defines video games as a medium," and I think that Idle Thumbs was perfectly equipped to have such a discussion!

 

Listening to this cast earlier on Matter, and again today, I was reminded of Maxim Gorky's famous "On a Visit to the Kingdom of Shadows" article that he wrote around 1896. If you took a film class in college (or a Russian culture class, probably) they more than likely had you read it - but for those who haven't before, I found the text of it here: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/contest-winner-36-black-and-white-and-in-color

 

The historical context of the article is that this is a famous Russian writer who went to see one of the earliest movies (soundless and colorless) and then wrote an article about his experience. The amazing part, for someone living in the Year of Our Lord PS3 2015 like me, is the terror and bewilderment with which Gorky describes the whole thing. It's amazing, and smart, and so genuine - it's not the kind of experience that I can imagine having today, unless I was a child seeing a film for the first time or something. Writer Lawrence Weschler wrote a short response to the piece (included in the link) about how he believes that the same things Gorky felt can still be felt today, but in a different context.

 

As I understand it, this is what the conversation about film was like when the medium was first created. People were asking questions like, "What is this? How is it unique? What does it mean to be a film? How can film be used to produce experiences and expressions which are unique to other forms of art?" Early Russian filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein were obsessed with the nature of film, and of pushing the medium to become something totally and completely new. They wrote big articles - back and forth to one another, almost, like a conversation - and of course directed and wrote films that they felt were the first steps into a totally new space. Part of that was the whole Soviet attitude towards art, I guess, which was shitty in a lot of ways...but it was really neat in others.

 

One of the early questions about film was, "How is this different from theater?" Lots of early films were pretty much just theater pieces that were captured on film and could be reproduced without the actors or props present. Gradually, to answer this question, Russian and American filmmakers became some of the earliest pioneers in the use of the film camera as an artistic tool. I think there's a similar conversation to be had about the nature of console games vs cabinets, or board games vs video games, etc.

 

But my point is...video games! I have never read anything that is to video games what Gorky's article was to film. I don't doubt that the conversation isn't happening, I just don't know of a definitive article like Gorky's. Does anyone have any interesting articles they've read about what video games are?

 

I think that the indie scene is especially important because a lot of indie developers are like the early pioneers of film - they're still asking "what is a video game?" I imagine that question was asked a lot in the early days of the medium, too. If anyone has watched GameCenterCX before, some of the early interviews with the big devs at Nintendo and Konami were really interesting because, in describing how those games were created, they were talking about how they personally grappled with the nature of video games and how to create new experiences.

 

Anyway, I'm a long-time lurker and I'm sorry if I've droned on too long! I hope I can fit in around here - Happy New Year, all!

EDIT: spelling

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But the question was "what is the best video game", was it not?

 

Also, only a tiny fraction of board games are commonly played in public spaces:  chess, dominoes, mancala, go, mah jong, and perhaps a dozen others with similar long cultural roots.  The rest, and the vast majority, are played in your house or your friend's house, so I'm having some trouble seeing where your comparison is coming from.

 

Many pubs have open board game nights these days.

 

If you're proposing that a game's primary utility is to make it easier to meet strangers, board games almost universally do it better than video games. They're more collaborative, they have a better arc of play and they think more about the implications of the rules than most video games of the era did. For that matter, speed dating does it better than games, so I'd propose that your criteria isn't a particularly good way to find the best video game, but the best thing that you personally want out of video games.

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If you're proposing that a game's primary utility is to make it easier to meet strangers

 

I'm not doing that at all, though I didn't do a good job of making it extra-clear that meeting strangers is only one aspect I appreciate about video games in public spaces.

 

The first reason I gave is the primary one, to me-- the things we do and see in public places are the best ones.  it's not just about meeting strangers, it's about the difference between the entertainment, expression, or appreciation of an entire society or community, vs. that of individuals or close friends & family.

 

Pub games are nice, but again, the question is not "what is the best game," the question is "what is the best video game," and that is why things like "snooker" or "darts" are not on my list.

 

Another reason they're not on my list is that they are not played in the same kinds of places where cabinet games were once widely played; snooker and darts are played almost exclusively in bars.  I love bars, don't get me wrong, but people below a certain age in most of the world can't go into bars and play 9-ball to amuse themselves, which would go against another of the meandering "best" criteria I listed.  If 9-ball were a video game.  Which it isn't.

 

The very earliest cabinet video games were initially played almost exclusively in bars, too, yes.  But the very earliest cabinet games (the monochrome ones, essentially: pong, space invaders, asteroids, etc) didn't make my short list, either.

 

Meeting strangers (really meeting them, and really strangers) is only one aspect of cabinet video games that makes them best to me, and it's an aspect that itself is really only a facet of the actual best-making thing-- play in public spaces.

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Your best video game has that as a criteria and it makes you disregards almost every single release of any video game in nearly the last 20 years. I don't agree that the best video game was released sometime before 1990. 

 

Even if you want to make your best game be about meeting strangers IRL, not only typing or voice chatting with them, I went and met with a few WoW guildies in England. I've met people at a Starcraft 2 LAN and at Starcraft 2 tournament streaming at a hackerspace. Similar with DOTA2.

 

Maybe Esports is the best game, it has LANs with audiences that has many people meet up because of a video game. 

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My favorite The Best part of this cast is when Chris realizes that his and Sean's elaborate criteria, definitions, and justifications are essentially just obfuscated versions of Jake's "This is the game I think is Best!"

 

And then Friedrich Nietzsche raises a saucy eyebrow and nods in Mr. Remo's direction.

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Nowadays I keep my hair short/shaved because my hairline has slowly been creeping backwards for the last 10 years or so, but back in the day it was not uncommon for women to tell me that they were jealous of my hair because of its curliness when I let it grow out.

 

Ghostbusters 2 is a perfectly enjoyable movie. And if you don't think that a scene where the Statue of Liberty is being driven through New York by an NES Advantage while "Higher & Higher" blasts in the background is amazing, I'm pretty sure you're some sort of monster.

 

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I like with version of the criteria where the best game is a game that does only what video games can do.

 

I think that leaves room Minecrafts, Dwarf Fortress, and Spelunkys to sit side by side. Also, while Super Mario 3 is divine platforming, I wonder if in this situation do you not have to look to Spelunky which is also pretty great platforming, plus all this other stuff. While Monkey Island 2 is a absolute top shelf favorite I think I might leave it off that particular list?

 

Anyway, Logarithmic Indian Jones Decay. Amazing podblast.  

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