Jake

Idle Thumbs 203: Goat Impossible

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Thanks to ThumbsDB, I've been able to scrape all the Audible audio book recommendations by the thumbs, with links to the actual discussions:

 

  •  : "You can get Inherent Vice on it" 81s
  •  : "Get a book; they’re good" 99s
  •  : "Featuring the works of Anthony Bourdain" 70s
  •  : "Don't get run over while listening to a book" 120s
  •  : "Why not try The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet?" 286s
  •  : "Harry Potter implicitly had boning and murder" 125s
  •  : "Let me tell you about Ursula K. Le Guin" 167s
  •  : "Used by the internet's Olly Moss" 244s
  •  : "This week's pick is The Sun Also Rises" 188s
  •  : "Six degrees of Gatsby/Zodiac/Kevin Bacon" 421s
  •  : "Listen to Charlton Heston read Immanuel Kant" 179s
  •  : "Whispersync is cool" 219s
  •  : "Listen to James Earl Jones read the Bible" 225s
  •  : "Relive the historical beef" 202s
  •  : "Why not listen to some Anthony Bourdain books?" 82s
  •  : "Perfect for, say, the Idle Book Club" 284s

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I think the aesthetic is still driven by the design, just in a more straightforwardly pragmatic way:

1: I want something like a new Souls game

2: Except I don't want shields or magic, nothing the player can use to make the combat easier and less scary

3: So what I want instead are powerful but slow weapons like guns the player can use tactically

4: But they can't be like modern guns, because then the player would rely on them exclusively, so they have to be pretty primitive

So then you end up with a kind of victorian setting just because that's what makes sense with those gameplay constraints. Now, maybe that could have been executed a bit better, but the big steps to get there all make sense.

 

I also think that, just like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls have an incredibly debt to the through-a-glass-darkly neo-medievalism of the Berserk manga among others, Bloodborne seems to have a debt to Priest and similar works, cooked up from the drip-feed of Christian dogma and foreign culture that Japan and Korea knew before the twentieth century. Sometimes it's corny or shallow to see what works come out of this several-steps-removed process of filtering, but at least with Miyazaki and his team, it's really enlightening, like Chris says.

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8ww56v.png

 

I looked the Murder She Wrote board game up on Amazon while listening and now all of my targeted Facebook ads are about Murder She Wrote. It rotates (wrotetates) between this and DVD box sets. Thanks Idle Thumbs!

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The YouTuber Chris mentioned needs to be offered a Job in city planning. In fact according to John Oliver his skills are going to be in high demand. 

 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Wpzvaqypav8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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For what it's worth, the Dark Soul's Design Works art book has a very long and in-depth interview with Miyazaki regarding everything, which might be what you wanted to know in regards to your thoughts on his design process.

 

I have a spare copy if you'd like me to send it to Thumbs HQ, if you're interested Chris.

 

One thing I do remember him saying is that the restrictive information and design came about when he was reading Lord of the Rings before it was translated into Japanese. His English was very limited, so he had to make up what happened between the parts he couldn't understand. He wanted to reflect this in the story-telling in the game.

 

Edit: Also, it's worth noting that this isn't his first game with these design choices, just that deamon souls was the first in the series of From games that got a world-wide release. There has been 4 King's Fields games that are similarly hard and cryptic like souls. So it's not as if it's sprung out of no-where. If that makes sense.

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One thing I do remember him saying is that the restrictive information and design came about when he was reading Lord of the Rings before it was translated into Japanese. His English was very limited, so he had to make up what happened between the parts he couldn't understand. He wanted to reflect this in the story-telling in the game.

 

Yeah, I recall something reading this too, somewhere.  I think it was something like his family used to vacation in Europe as a kid he didn't know the language very well or at all, so he'd be poring through books and trying to make sense of what he could understand, using what pictures were there as a base, etc.  And as a child this was exceptionally evocative.  So to some extent Demon/Dark Souls were an intentional recreation of that feeling.  Wish I could find the exact interview.

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One thing I do remember him saying is that the restrictive information and design came about when he was reading Lord of the Rings before it was translated into Japanese. His English was very limited, so he had to make up what happened between the parts he couldn't understand. He wanted to reflect this in the story-telling in the game.

Yeah, I recall something reading this too, somewhere.  I think it was something like his family used to vacation in Europe as a kid he didn't know the language very well or at all, so he'd be poring through books and trying to make sense of what he could understand, using what pictures were there as a base, etc.  And as a child this was exceptionally evocative.  So to some extent Demon/Dark Souls were an intentional recreation of that feeling.  Wish I could find the exact interview.

 

Vasari quoted the interview you guys are talking about a few posts up.

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Vasari quoted the interview you guys are talking about a few posts up.

 

Well at least SOMEONE noticed >: (

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On the aesthetic of Bloodborne, I think it's really following in the footsteps of the reserved nature of the Souls games.  Just as the Souls games were a decrepit medieval land, Bloodborne is that filter laid over a Victorian/steam punk world.  In any other game drawing on this look, you'd have a wacky inventor with a flying machine.  Or like Dishonored, you've have a crazy mechanical facemask with built in binoculars.  It's so much more reserved than any other game in this kind of fictional location would be. 

 

It also maintains the same kind of nihilism of the Souls games.  A lot of the enemies in all these games aren't evil.  They've been corrupted in some way.  While that corruption has a physical component, it is mostly driven by a spiritual or emotional sense of complete pointlessness to everything, planting that seed of doubt that the world, and the gods, and everything actually has no meaning, and that starts a downward spiral of decay and despair.  Dark Souls 1 really drives it home in a few places.  Like when you meet your first god, and should you choose to challenge her, discover that she was only ever an illusion.  Or when your ever jolly buddy the Sun Knight finally gives into either madness or despair.  DS1 and 2 both cast some  doubt as to whether or not you are even exploring a real space, or if it's just a fever dream created by your brain as you die in some other place, lands that truly have no meaning whatsoever. 

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Well at least SOMEONE noticed >: (

 

Actually reading it, it's funny to hear Ryan Morris say that Miyazaki is a big enough fan of Game of Thrones to have bought the Blu-ray while in America, because it wasn't available in Japan yet. Of course, he says that he likes it because it reminds him of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with its political maneuvering among a massive cast, rather than him just liking the grimness or sexiness or whatever.

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I feel like IJ would be a rough listen! I wanted to check out the audiobook of Pikety's Capital, but it has a 100 page PDF of graphs, which doesn't work for my commuter listen.

The graphs in Capital are unimportant. I'm not sure how the math (there's not much, but there's some), but it should be a decent listen.

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Like Chris, I also greatly enjoyed both Get Smart and Inspector Gadget as a kid and was equally IGN.com'ed when I learned Maxwell Smart and Inspector Gadget were the same person.  And my first thought when Jake mentioned French Stewart was that he was the guy who took over the role in the direct-to-video.  Also to confirm a third thing, there is a new Inspector Gadget show.  It's a CG cartoon that was originally going to be on Cartoon Network but is now Netflix exclusive.  Despite being called Inspector Gadget, the protagonist is actually a teenage Penny.

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The graphs in Capital are unimportant. I'm not sure how the math (there's not much, but there's some), but it should be a decent listen.

 

You get all the graphs as a PDF with the audiobook, it is indeed a good listen.

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Despite being called Inspector Gadget, the protagonist is actually a teenage Penny.

 

How is that different to previous Inspector Gadgets

 

unless you're saying that Penny's actually front and centre in this one and her secret secret-agenting is only a part of her life now? 13-year-old me would be most interested to know

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How is that different to previous Inspector Gadgets

 

unless you're saying that Penny's actually front and centre in this one and her secret secret-agenting is only a part of her life now? 13-year-old me would be most interested to know

 

I haven't seen the show, but from what I understand Penny is now an official agent so she's no longer tagging along with Gadget.  She's apparently more of a lead character than in other shows but I'm not sure what that exactly means.

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Also on the overall narrative design in Souls games, its curious how there very cleaver how while they show you a "doomed" world (like in many other games) they also focus a lot on the downfall process, as step by step you go uncovering what happened and how each step relate directly or not (as Bjorn said, the nihilism aspect often lead characters in downspires that make everything even worst) to what lead the situation to its current form (while in other games is often a single step - zombies/demons/whatever invaded -> place doomed), but it´s almost like archeology, as you might miss pieces and this leads you to a wrong theory or find something that shed a new light.

 

One the visual design it appear to me, that they put a lot of effort on making equipment reflect cultures or indivudal characters, this often reinforce the archeology aspect, I remember(I could be wrong) once seeing a video about lore where the person pointed how you find the same enemies of other areas in a certain place, the catch was when he noticed that following the lore, several knights from several places all tried make the to a fortress, but they failed, that area was far as they could go.

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I love the visual design of Demon's Souls. It stuck out to me when I first played it (imported Asian region disc!), because of its lack of videogaminess. That drab medieval world, but done with so much care and detail looked great to me, and it made the more outrageous monsters seem that much more frightening.

 

I had similar feelings about Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I know that "restraint" is not high on the list of words that come to mind when thinking about MGS, but at a time when everything else was greebled to fuck and covered in layers upon layers of post-process shaders and other trickery, MGS 4 looked great because it had high-polygon models with high-resolution textures, and meticulous animation. That's true of the whole series, but it stood out especially in 4 because of the direction of other games of the time.

 

Not that it didn't use current graphical techniques, but the foundation was so good that they could be subtle about it.

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I think I've played that Murder She Wrote game before, either that or I had a serious case of deja vu. Listening to it being described was pretty eerie.

 

Also, if I was caught up on Twin Peaks, I'd start paying for random and meaningless messages similar to "The owls are not what they seem" to be read out in the middle of the podcast, because why not?

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Man you guys, an official Dreamcast VGA box goes for a few hundred still in box, it's insane. Luckily there are tons of knock offs for like $50 or less, including what seems to be a straight cord to VGA which did not exist when I got mine.

 

I'm afraid to ever buy a new HDTV because one of the main reasons for the one I bought in 2008 was so I could have ports for my multiple game consoles, so three HDMI, two component, one S-video, one RCA A/V, one Coaxial, and of course one VGA. Only annoying thing is I have too many various consoles so I have to switch a lot of those ports a lot, especially because the PS2 can't output PSX games through the component, which is completely idiotic. Anyway, I HATE that new TVs don't come with a wealth of these ports. Horrible.

 

Anyway luckily PC Monitors still have VGA often so some Thumbs Dreamcast streaming would be neat. Danielle should do Soul Reaver or Rayman 2, I'd love it.

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How is that different to previous Inspector Gadgets

 

There's actually a whole playlist of Inspector Gadget episodes with Gadget himself edited out, which turns it into a kind of awesome Johnny Quest type thing starring Penny.

 

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Not that the Thumbs are more likely to play it, but the Murder She Wrote board game sounds somewhat like an overbranded and underbaked version of the excellent Japanese board game Tragedy Looper. Hopefully the similarities extend to include enjoyability during play.

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I was aware of the Murder She Wrote boardgame not because I've ever seen or played it myself, but because the very enjoyable boardgaming podcast Flip The Table did an episode on it early in their run:

http://tableflipsyou.blogspot.com/2012/11/episode-16-murder-she-wrote.html

 

They find old, obscure and generally awful boardgames (frequently licensed), give them a trial play or two, then do a pretty comprehensive review, starting with discussing the game's subject matter, moving on to a components breakdown, describing how the game plays, and of course finally sharing opinions. They had a lot of fun with the concept of multiple Angela Lansburies, let me tell you. And man, they're on their third season or so and I still have only run into maybe two games they've covered that I even knew existed prior to their podcast. I think my favorite discovery was when they did the All My Children boardgame. Based on the longrunning soap opera and...published by TSR. You know, the D&D guys.

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