Ep. 197 - Myst Opportunities, with Chris Remo and Mathew Kumar

wickedcestus

Good to hear Chris Remo again! I didn’t know about his new crossword show but it is very fitting. He actually inspired me to start doing the NYT crossword about five years ago when I was listening to Idle Thumbs, and I still do it every day! It’s good fun. I found it funny that the show format does not really suit his way of thinking/podcasting but he rolled with it well.

TracyDMcGrath

wickedcestus I think what I loved about Idle Thumbs, especially in its later years, was just how little they all wanted to talk about videogames even though that ostensibly was the topic of the show.

exodus

TracyDMcGrath he managed to continue the tradition here as much as possible!

whatsarobot

TracyDMcGrath absolutely agree with this, and it’s the reason why Important If True was my #1 favourite podcast during its all-too-brief run.

i also want to chime in with lots of Chris Remo love. he’s so compelling and charming that he almost makes me want to become a crossword puzzler. he’s a weird fit for the Insert Credit show, maybe, but i think he’d shine brighter with a Brandon-Frank dynamic than with a Brandon-Mathew dynamic (and that’s no shade on Mathew Kumar, who is also a delight).

dylanfills

My favorite Zelda Character is coincidentally also THE BEST C-list villain

esper

devilsblush this is a question Magic: the Gathering deals with occasionally, now that it has separate card types to represent Equipment and Vehicles. the traditionally divisive question has been, is a Unicycle a vehicle?

It technically transports people, but is primarily used for, like, entertainment purposes. the line is blurry sometimes.

yeso

I’ve been playing through the Myst games and my 2¢ is that they are very good, but I agree with what guest chris was describing re their having been received as sort of game-like software. I think that’s the appreciative way to approach them.

I don’t think the witness quite fits because it’s dedicated to a single puzzle logic through line, and Myst is more about atmosphere and otherworldliness. The pre-myst cyan game Spelunx has these half puzzle half thing to play around with design that’s a clearer example of the difference I think.

So I could be way off but I think the myst games strongest elements are more similar to things like LSD or Proteus….

And the original myst is by far the clumsiest, Riven was a huge leap in terms of I guess just overall coherence

Winckle

I’d love to ask Chris Remo if he does any UK crosswords now he’s living here. I do the Guardian quick crossword each day and I find it much harder than the NYT because UK crosswords have far fewer spaces that intersect.

An average UK grid looks like this:

Whereas a USA grid looks like this:

I get much more stuck on British crosswords because sometimes even with all the letters from other answers I just don’t know it. Particularly if it’s trivia I just don’t know rather than wordplay.

Winckle

Winckle Answering myself here, but Chris actually did a Guardian quick crossword on his show a few weeks ago.

It’s even one I did myself when it came out, and he does admirably well with the UK specific answers such as “Stamp Duty”

sabertoothalex

I remember being really excited at the time that a version of my IRL car, a 1992 Honda Civic Si, was going to be in Gran Turismo 5. I ended up being sad that that game started doing the Premium and Standard cars where the Standard versions are waaaaaay less detailed then the Premium cars. Of course an almost 20 year old car got the Standard treatment, disrespectful btw, but I still only used that car for quite a lot of my playtime with that game!

◉◉maru

What I have always found fascinating with English-spoken crosswords is the apparently unspoken rule that the grid should be symmetrical. Really speaks to the versatility of your language.

Shaneus

So, where are the pictures of the cat ChrisRemo* is sitting? I shouldn’t have to ask about this kind of thing, geez.

*intentional, because I dig the way Brandon says his name as if it’s one word

aerisdead

whatsarobot no particular shade taken because clearly the problem is Brandon, because imho I think the bonus stuff we did afterwards where I chat with Remo about crosswords totally works and it’s one of the favourite things I’ve done on the show (probably because it was so nice to reconnect with Remo outside of the strict ruleset of the show, who I haven’t spoken to in ages).

◉◉maru

Damn, I am catching up on this seemingly charming Chris Remo fellow (never heard of the guy before) and was pretty much expecting to fall into some weird secret world of youtube crossworld puzzle solving with millions of views but no! This is relatively new and only has hundreds of views per day still! I feel like have been accidentally introduced to a young garage band that’s going to hit it big in the next two years. This kind of daily 20min content for boomers seems like a no brainer to satisfy the Algorithm Gods. What’s the Youtube equivalent of buying the shoddily printed T-shirt in the bar to show I was cool and knew them before they got super famous?

whatsarobot

◉◉maru here you go!

Shaneus

◉◉maru Can’t recommend enough a fan-made best of Idle Thumbs compilation that goes for several hours, but IMO is a great listen.

https://archive.org/download/this-year-collection/thisyear018_idlethumbsor_56kbps.mp3

I don’t know how it would come off to someone who didn’t listen to episodes as they were released originally, but hopefully it’s aged okay without the nostalgia goggles tint.

◉◉maru

whatsarobot Shaneus Thanks! Added to my playlist for the coming weekend.

tokucowboy

This is the first thing that came to mind when thinking about the best autoscrolling section in a video game:

It really encapsulates the breadth of pulp-fiction tones that Resident Evil 4 somehow manages to pull off. Here, we’ve gone from the image of your driver being burned at the stake by seemingly normal human cultists, to being chased by an enormous robotic statue of the Spanish Napoleon little person who someone has your Skype number. It’s both “I can’t believe this is happening” & “of course this is happening right now” all at once.

TracyDMcGrath

One of my favorite Idle Thumbs moments:

whatsarobot

TracyDMcGrath Nick being convinced (incorrectly) that Mario is saying “thank you so nice” is peak Idle Thumbs

exodus

The reason this could never happen on the insert credit show is that we all already know it’s “that’s-a-so-nice”

The show might be funnier if we had more questions and fewer answers

whatsarobot

exodus orrrr it might also be funnier if there was only one question, and then an hour to try and answer it…

tapevulture

Finally an example of how someone with a normal person’s knowledge of video games would perform on the show

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