Jake

Idle Thumbs 201: Adults Only

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This is the thread for this episode! I have no internet at home and the new episode template is too unwieldy to manage on my phone so this is what we get for now! Thanks Cara for being on the show this week.

Games Discussed: Full Throttle, Cities Skylines, SimCity (2013), Tomb Raider, White Night, Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians - The Crazy Arcade Adventure!, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD/SOUNDCLOUD/ITUNES HERE: https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/adults-only

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I just got the pun in "Embed With..."

 

Also, my biggest surprise starting grad studies in History was how often we have to chokehold crocodiles.

 

EDIT: Jesus, these poo puns. That's it. I'm done. Podcast over.

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This episode is an audio special with Cara's unusual accent and the full new intro.

Also yes it's been two decades but I had been thinking I should play Full Throttle when hearing you all talk about it... I guess instead I should be getting round to Grim Fandango until I forget the stuff said here. (not that you're expected to be careful about the plot at this point, it's just funny I had the exact experience that got me interested in playing the game and then turned me off doing it any time soon)

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Hey Chris, on Tomb Raider, you would have had to play Legend and maybe Anniversary first because when Crystal Dynamics took over the games the series was pretty much rebooted. Core handled all of the previous 5 or 6 games and Crystal Dynamics just used Prince of Persia mechanics with guns.

 

So basically you were playing a direct sequel to Legend and unfortunately the story (while still not great) for Underworld is absolutely impossible to understand without having played Legend first. It directly references things where the only way you could get what is going on is solely by playing Legend and possibly recently. They don't bother with any recap whatsoever except maybe one sentence at the beginning on the boat.

 

Wait, maybe there was a short 1 minute recap video in the pause menu should you stumble upon it. Yeah I remember now. I watched it and exclaimed to myself that it failed to make any god damn sense to new players as it was just like a bizarre trailer type mashup of dialogue clips and random scenes.

 

Anyway, yeah I only played the Crystal Dynamics trilogy last year and Underworld was definitely the highlight. It is also pretty awesome for just ignoring the need for any boss fights and all "bosses" instead were just an ultimate room of puzzles before the next sequence. I just wanted to defend the story a little bit because I played Anniversary, Legend, and then Underworld back to back in that order and I was pretty engaged in the story and was very intrigued on what might happen next. This is not to say the story is clever as it's pretty standard save the world video game fare, but it was fun enough for a series where you fight dinosaurs and giant squids. The ending was also unpredictably an incredible downer all the way around because the spoiler about the mother at the end was totally not expected (by myself at least).

 

EDIT: And fuck yeah, Cara Ellison! I had to unfortunately quit Not a Game Podcast because she seemed to disappear (along with Craig) and besides Pip, we were left with a bunch of people who were utterly boring and didn't seem to have any knowledge or desire whatsoever to play the games they were trying to discuss.

 

So this is amazing to have her interacting with you guys as she was definitely a driving force along with Craig on the podcast and I miss the original banter of the show. I hope she can make more appearances in the future even though she lives in another country.

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It made me feel bad when danielle said "I'll talk like a normal person now".

 

I DO want to revel in that accent, but I also don't want to give her any reason to ever stop using it all the time. Also I just generally feel like a jerk

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the best Ratchet and Clank title was the one they had to change to "A Crack in Time" because it went too far:

 

Ratchet and Clank: Clock Blockers

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EDIT: Jesus, these poo puns. That's it. I'm done. Podcast over.

 

I was super bummed that nobody reacted to Danielle's "patch number 2" joke :sad: .

 

(I laughed at it.)

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They should all be ashamed for firing Sean last week. Those puns were way worse.

 

EDIT: Just want to be clear that I love puns. Don't ever change.

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I detect some Bowie influence in the theme song

 

now there's an interesting special episode: convince David Bowie to sing the Idle Thumbs theme song

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Well there was the time that Chris sang "Space Oddity" during the Kerbal Space Program stream and Idle Thumbs lost it's kickstarter money to David Bowie.

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I enjoyed that Full Throttle talk and desperately want that Corley Motors shirt now.

 

I don't think this is touched on in the cast but Jake mentioned something similar and I've heard you can apparently use height maps of real world locations to create maps in Cities Skylines.  A quick search came up with this but I haven't bought the game yet so don't know how effective it is.  If I can make quick maps of San Francisco or Pittsburgh and deal with those geographic challenges that would be pretty great.

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I'd like to check in as another kid who told his dad he should stop drinking soda and driving.

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In an entirely different direction, I didn't understand the concept of mass production as a child so when the slogan for Jenga was "There is only one Jenga", I took that literally and wondered why it took them so long to sell the copy of their game.

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RE: Chris's discussion with the New York Times reporter about Firewatch being a game about adults:  I wonder if developers get hit with questions like, "What ESRB rating are you aiming for?"

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Time to find out if full throttle runs on windows 7. 

 

Re city building not on a grid: Games that actually do this really well are RTS games. Usually you are just throwing your buildings down somewhat randomly within a defensible area. You want barracks and war factories to be on the edge of your base facing outward, and your power, research and other important buildings to be in the protected interior. All my bases in the C&C games would turn into gigantic messes, especially once building rotation was allowed, however Supreme commander incentivised interconnection of structures, (and your units could actually navigate around buildings) so my bases were very grid based. 

 

I have a similar experience in terms of playing new games and feeling bad when I don't. I go out to a bar weekly with my friends where one of the topics of discussion is video games, I feel bad when all I have played in Civ5, Payday 2 and Crusader Kings 2 since I have talked about these games to death.

 

P.S. Cara is a great guest host!

 

P.P.S. the new theme song is weird in a good way.

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Every time someone makes a joke or a pun, and Jake gets indignant, and upset, it is like the most joyful, wonderful thing. I really, 100% mean it. I look forward to this podcast every week because everyone on the cast love to build conversations, always accepting, and always keeping things moving. So, so often in modern media, people have this really too cool attitude that makes the open sharing of ideas feel potentially caustic. Idle Thumbs really works hard to make sure that there's an environment for creation and conversation, and it just feels so good to listen to. This means that moments where someone throws up the hands and says "fuck off" like Jake does ("Master.bat" offers two moments, and then "Catch-22" offers one that sounds like it's punctuated by claps) it feels jarring, but in a really good way, since Jake's voice has a smiling quality to it that makes even the rejection of the joke seem ok, and fun. OOF.

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Every time someone makes a joke or a pun, and Jake gets indignant, and upset, it is like the most joyful, wonderful thing. I really, 100% mean it. I look forward to this podcast every week because everyone on the cast love to build conversations, always accepting, and always keeping things moving. So, so often in modern media, people have this really too cool attitude that makes the open sharing of ideas feel potentially caustic. Idle Thumbs really works hard to make sure that there's an environment for creation and conversation, and it just feels so good to listen to. This means that moments where someone throws up the hands and says "fuck off" like Jake does ("Master.bat" offers two moments, and then "Catch-22" offers one that sounds like it's punctuated by claps) it feels jarring, but in a really good way, since Jake's voice has a smiling quality to it that makes even the rejection of the joke seem ok, and fun. OOF.

 

If you love people suffering through puns, you should check out the Bugle Podcast. Andy Zoltsman is a grandmaster punsmith and Jon Oliver (of Daily Show and Last Week Tonight) seems to feel physical pain when Zoltsman goes on a pun run. Andy once did several minutes of Russian City name puns.

 

The pun run starts at 18:15

 

http://thebuglepodcast.com/bugle-244-russian-into-battle/

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I look forward to this podcast every week because everyone on the cast love to build conversations, always accepting, and always keeping things moving. So, so often in modern media, people have this really too cool attitude that makes the open sharing of ideas feel potentially caustic.

This is a great observation, RubixsQube. I now realize that one of the biggest reasons I stopped listening to the Giant Bombcast is that it's full of people shutting each other down. It's really unpleasant to witness; I always feel bad for whoever Jeff is dumping on. Uh, not to name names or anything. 

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Actually, while those puns are indeed pretty goofy, and John Oliver is indeed suffering, I think that this podcast is in stark difference to the gleeful response that I am pointing out. John Oliver is groaning, and as you point out (obviously hyperbolically, I recognize), he seems to be "feel[ing] physical pain;" the point is, his responses makes it sound like he wants this to stop. My Brother, My Brother and Me has a similar take on the (actually not very funny) Sad Libs they sometimes do. Jake's response on the podcast to Chris is partially, "ugh, that's bad," and "ugh, that's so good, that's actually clever and funny," and the tone of his voice reflects this.
 
Unless, of course, he really does hate Chris' (really fantastic) puns, in which case, I'm just writing a bad high-school english essay.
 

This is a great observation, RubixsQube. I now realize that one of the biggest reasons I stopped listening to the Giant Bombcast is that it's full of people shutting each other down. It's really unpleasant to witness; I always feel bad for whoever Jeff is dumping on. Uh, not to name names or anything.

 

This is pretty much why I stopped consuming any Giant Bomb media, entirely.

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This is a secondhand story, but the drinking & driving stories reminds me of the story floating around Norman, Oklahoma where the preschool child of OU head football coach Bob Stoops told an authority figure "My dad drinks and drives all the time."

 

Bob Stoops is the closest thing to a celebrity that Norman, Oklahoma has, so there was a great sigh of relief when they pressed a little further and found out that it was Diet Pepsi he drank all the time.

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I agree about the new intro having a bit of an early Bowie vibe. Way into it!

 

I enjoyed the conversation about people's experiences growing up with the different sort of game systems that were available to them and what kind of trajectory they had with games as a result. I didn't really have consoles growing up, and basically just played PC games, but the funny thing is I have very strong memories about NES and SNES games that I don't have with subsequent console games (with the exception of multiplayer N64 games) just because I would play a ton of those early Nintendo games when I would go over to friends' houses, but by the time the next generation of consoles arrived I was just at an age and part of my life where that wasn't something that I would really do.

 

The discussion about DOTA polish was really interesting too. Chris is right that starting out it feels like this really raw, incomprehensible thing. It's only after you've been playing for hundreds of hours when you internalize how all these different sounds, lighting effects and other visual language are used to convey information to the player that you see just how polished the game is. This is in contrast to like a Blizzard game where Blizzard is also good at creating super polished games, but part of Blizzard's polishing process is being really good at holding a new player's hand whereas the refinement Valve brings to their multiplayer games is dedicated almost completely to the existing player base.

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I don't know if I like the instrumental version of the new theme more than the one with voice. But both sound very ominous, a bit of a cyber punk feel.

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Ground Remo to Idle Thumbs

Ground Remo to Idle Thumbs

Load your Client and put your VR on

Ground Remo to Idle Thumbs (Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six)

Commencing Twitch Stream Far Cry on (Five, Four, Three)

Checking God Rays and may Allard be with you (Two, One, Games)

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I got a bit of a Shatner vibe from the lyrics in the new theme song. 

 

I really like the sound of Cara Ellison's voice.

 

Let's #scoopsgate to get him to go to SF and cast a pod. 

 

The discussion about maps being political and representative in Sim City as the "correct" way to city plan (or city plan for cars), and i think that if it was European, it would be dots along a line. Europe seems a lot more condensed around centers than the (NE) US. Here in CZ theres land that doesnt belong to a town in between towns, and when i first realized that it kinda blew me away.

 

"We just left Blatna, what town are we in now?" 

"We are not in a town"

"But how does that house get mail??"

 

maybe a European Sim city would be more about how to expand the city and bring business while modernizing your city while still adhering to UNESCO rules and guidelines, then getting fed up, starting a war, letting your city get bombed to crap, so you can rebuild it the way you want it.

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