Idle Thumbs 131: Real Life

[Jake]

Idle Thumbs 131:

 

 

Real Life

Just when you think Chris has fallen so deep into Spelunky there's no escape, out of the darkness emerge two open arms, ready for the catch. Jeff Green joins us this week for talk of games journalism, SteamOS, live streaming, his decade-later return to Black Mesa, and more Spelunky.

 

Things Discussed: Games journalism, Spelunky, The Wolf Among Us, Grand Theft Auto V, Black Mesa: Source, SteamOS, The Stanley Parable

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[Faegbeard]

The free-to-play comment is not entirely correct. Maple Story suggests you take a break after 3 hours. Eventually it starts pleading for you to take a break.

[tegan]

GTA didn't let you skip missions by failing them before?

 

It always weirds me out that bizarrely good GTA knockoff The Simpsons Hit & Run has a bunch of usability features like that that GTA only added after it came out.

[TheLastBaron]

The intro to this made me laugh out loud in class. YES I WAS LISTENING TO A PODCAST IN CLASS PLEASE SUE ME.

[feelthedarkness]

I haven't even started it, but I just want to say I'm really appreciating two weeks in a row of vintage, extra-jumbo-length artisanal casting. 

[Merus]

hand-whittled on a homemade podblast platform, each RSS entry individually crafted, no two alike, no two parseable by iTunes in the same way

[Max Ernst]

Jeff Green is a treasure.

[Sno]

Count me among the people who started listening to Idle Thumbs after GFW ended, heh.

[Altaco]

Holy shit, Jeff Green!

 

This takes me back.  I read the shit out of CGW back in the day.  Always loved Jeff's column in the back.

[tegan]

I hope that Hunter Simmons makes an account to say how he never gave up hope that his letter would get read.

 

 

 

EDIT: Oh hey, Jake's getting a Wii U. Add me for exciting insights into Super Metroid.

 

 

 

[Henroid]

Currently listening but oh my goodness, this conversation about cell phones / recording our lives instead of living our lives. The best, and 100% my sentiment.

 

Also this post is ironic.

[Justin Leego]

Tegs that is very Nedroid-esque, I like.

I love Jeff Green forever after he liked my website on Twitter. Looking forward to the episode.

[robotslave]

OK. So, I'm like 1/4 way into this podcast, and y'all are talking about Spelunky and rage-quitting games...

 

I came to Spelunky after playing Dwarf Fortress for a couple weeks (let's pretend it was only a couple weeks).

 

And as a consequence, the experience of dying on spikes or a frog was... hilarious.  I mean, just completely side-splitting.

 

This got me through to where I could almost but not quite get through the third (ice-alien-yeti) world, most runs, and still crack up every time I died.

 

This was the initial PC version, I've never played the newfangled xboxlive one, but I gather it's basically the same game.

 

Have you played Dwarf Fortress, thumbs?

 

Have you googled "losing is fun", and found a DF link at the top of your results?

[robotslave]

Regarding the music of the 80s...

 

Oh gosh yes, so much schlock.  So, so much...

 

And yet.

 

Sonic Youth

 

Huusker Du

 

Prince.  So much Prince.

 

The Replacements

 

Negativeland.  Show me a band since that's been as avante-garde as Negativeland...

 

the Go-Gos, even.  Or Cyndi Lauper.

 

or Joan Jett 

 

not to mention the foundation and early chart success of...  uh, hip-hop

 

 

I mean, there's crap nostalgia, and yet there's entirely justifiable nostalgia, no?

[elmuerte]

  On 11/7/2013 at 1:30 AM, Faegbeard said:

The free-to-play comment is not entirely correct. Maple Story suggests you take a break after 3 hours. Eventually it starts pleading for you to take a break.

 

Isn't that more or less government mandated after a couple of serious health incidents in Korea?

 

 

  On 11/7/2013 at 1:57 AM, tegan said:

It always weirds me out that bizarrely good GTA knockoff The Simpsons Hit & Run has a bunch of usability features like that that GTA only added after it came out.

 

Like what? Hit & Run was really good, both as game and as Simpsons universe.

[Video Games Are Childish]

is it just me or are the marines way stupider in black mesa source. i ask because its been a long time and it might just be nostalgia but fighting those marines in hl1 in 1998 was like, watching the terminator, they were like, AI codified into a killing machine. in my playthrough of black mesa source i was juking them and cheesing them mad easy though, like, exposing only half of my body climbing on a ladder up out of a hole, just enough to get my reticle on them, and then firing, they couldn't do anything. also like, just slowly coming around a corner so i only see their arm or hand and blasting them with the .357 magnum because its instant kill that close. it seems to me like there was no way the hl1 marines would stand for anything like that, they seemed like FPS borg, maybe i could have done that cheesy tactic once or twice but then they'd instantly adapt

 

i can say for sure the sound affects it, because they sound like monsters in hl1, like, different than what you are as a human and upsetting:

 

and in black mesa source they sound like any other generic military goons in video gaming:

 

also i have OCD problems with it like mentioned on the podcast, like the first time you see the marines in hl1 is when you get to the surface, right? for like 2 minutes max but at least you get to fresh air before having to go under again for the tentacle encounter... in black mesa source you don't get to the surface until like the sattellite launch? it totally threw off my sense of pacing. its real close but doesn't match the original

[tegan]

  On 11/7/2013 at 10:16 AM, elmuerte said:

Like what? Hit & Run was really good, both as game and as Simpsons universe.

 

IIRC, GTA didn't add the ability to restart a mission from within the mission itself until after Hit & Run did it.

[KodeAndGame]

I want to know about that Pierre Shorette Spotify playlist. Does anyone have any info on that? 

[Nappi]

Great guest!

 

Jake, you can totally save in Stanley Parable, but you have to enable it in the options first. Which is a bit weird, actually.

[Jake]

Oh that's odd. Good to know!

[Salacious Snake]

  On 11/7/2013 at 9:08 AM, robotslave said:

I mean, there's crap nostalgia, and yet there's entirely justifiable nostalgia, no?

 

It's not nostalgia when you're still listening to these bands because they're actually good. I don't put on a Negativland record to remind myself of the Soviet era, I do it because their music is still interesting. 

 

Even the most poppy pop-cultural stuff transcends that status. I mean, Michael Jackson was legitimately great, and I still love his music. I guess I can't entirely mentally divorce it from the whole zeitgeist of the Thriller/Bad era that I grew up in, but that's not why I still listen, at least I don't think it is.

 

It's nostalgia when you still dig something that's probably shitty just because it makes you feel like you're back in high school, listening to the shitty music you listened to back then.

[clyde]

I like thinking that Chris was asking if Jeff had to order the new monitor through the one he was ashamed of just having shattered, for symbolic reasons rather than technical curiosity. It's a wonderful allegory.

[mikemariano]

I greatly enjoyed Jake's iPad/Yule Log app Dad Joke.  I have love for dad.

[Dualhammers]

This episode was odd for me because it revealed how much of an out-of-the-loop weirdo I was as a kid playing Games that I was never invested in things such as CGW, GFW, Shack News, or even Nintendo Power. Being so heavily involved in the indie community now I feel as though I am missing a critical pieces of knowledge about my own heritage. 

Chris, your description of having to let go of Platform muscle memory to unlock Spelunky caused a satisfying shift in my understanding of that game. It helped me articulate what I've felt is so interesting about it. The game is essentially an organic puzzle, evolving and cascading but essentially broken up into discrete problems you have to encounter and overcome. This may be the most obvious baby revelation but it was useful to me.

You also mentioned how Spelunky does not have any variation in the outcome of movement or physics interactions given the same input, and how this eschews what a lot of games do for "flavor." This also made me remember how much frustration I've found in various games that do use an element of randomness to enhance the flavor of the game, by providing variation to mechanics, or to make the world feel more real or alive. The most common example I have experienced is the randomness of bullet trajectory in a game where you fire a weapon, as a short-hand for the randomness introduced into your aim by the recoil of the weapon. In an attempt to create verisimilitude they undermine the ability of the player to understand how the system works. In certain games it can be used for artistic effect: by providing a reminder that life is too big a complex to understand, but most of the time no such message is implied and the result is just annoyance.

[Berzee]

Just got to the part about the glass eye. Glad for my years of training in silent laughter.