@fezrock: I read just the first Hardy Boys Case Files back when I was younger, and it's pretty wild that one of the bros' girlfriend just dies in a car bomb in the first chapter. Then there are just terrorists with Uzis all over the place.
@danryckert I somehow felt obliged to point out that Android has like 87.5% worldwide market share in operating systems on phones, mainly because I recently had to research this stuff for work and I was surprised as well. I mean I knew it was the clear winner but had no idea that it crushed iOS so hard. iOS is like 12.1% and then the rest is all the garbage that nobody cares about.
I'm surprised that people are surprised by this. It just stands to reason that Android, being available on a whole host of phones of varying costs from different manufacturers, would be the OS that is most easily available to the most people. Apple has the brand recognition and prestige factor, but the reality is that their phones are pretty expensive for what they are, and plenty of people can't justify spending that much more when there are cheaper (pretty much as good) Android options available.
So I guess I'm always surprised when Dan or any of the other GB staff thinks that iPhones are just the default device within the smartphone market. iPhones aren't luxury, because I don't think there really are any truly luxury or prestige brands of smartphones that are just absurdly expensive, but iPhones certainly strike me as a masstige sort of place in the market. Very bougie, as Abby is so fond of saying.
Thank you, Abby, for bringing those Nancy games into the fold! My girlfriend has played those with her sister and her cousin since they started coming out and she was so happy to hear that you'd be taking a look at them! My girlfriend enjoys watching GB with me but she literally dropped what she was doing and jumped on the couch to watch this. Seeing her point at the screen and get impatient with you as you played, and then seeing her horrific realization that she was being just like me, was so great. Even your picking up on certain goofy aspects of the game (like the weird-looking NPCs, "It's locked.", and even your reactions to Vinny being similar to my reactions when I first played with her) made her smile.
It's been so good to have your voice and perspective on things and I can't thank you enough for the work you've done so far. I know it sounds silly but it's great to be able to share more of this part of my life with my girlfriend and have her engage so actively with it.
I don't know your username on the site but I hope you see this! I'll be waiting here patiently with one half of a high five until you do!
The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew are ghost written. When I was in elementary school, the author of the (then) most recent Hardy Boys books came in and basically went "yeah that name on the cover is a lie."
In hindsight, was kinda weird of them to let that guy get booked to give presentations at schools.
Haha, interesting that he was allowed to speak so freely about it. Even though it's often common knowledge to adults, I kinda would've thought that the ghostwriters might have something in their contract where they're not supposed to break the illusion for younger kids, for the sake of the brand.
I actually think having a collective pseudonym, where the "author" was never a real person, is kinda cool. It's kinda neat that the the writing style and subject matter of the series is just an idea that any author can inhabit. I'm guessing the reality is often less romantic and the fact that they were ghostwritten from the start was probably so the publisher could have more control over the series, and hire/fire writers as they please without affecting public perception of the series.
I feel more weird about ghostwriting when a series of books starts off being written by one real author (K.A. Applegate of Animorphs, notable incest weirdo V. C. Andrews of Flowers in the Attic and a zillion other family saga books, Tom Clancy to an extent, etc.) but then later on they just have other writers take over the series while still crediting it to the original author. Feels like even less of a fun wink and a nod than having a collective pseudonym.
Also R. L. Stine is still on record as claiming that he wrote every single mainline Goosebumps book with his name on them, which is wild. I mean, they were kinda formulaic and often a pastiche of existing horror stories, but still, those things came out monthly for quite a few years. Maybe serialized genre fiction is easier to write on a regular basis than I'm making it out to be; I'm no writer.
Man, does Vinny know that by modulating the voice down several octaves, giving it a more sinister tone, he basically made That's You into the gimmick of Trivia Murder Party (or whatever it's called) from Jackbox Party Pack 3?
Late to this, but I wanna see the receipts on Mary somehow beating the bird Divine Beast without rotating it. That seems suspect as hell.
I went and watched a Youtube video of that temple on 1.5x speed to remind myself what the different puzzles are. All of the puzzles related to the tilting are either "you need to change the elevation of some part of the bird to be able to glide to it" or "the tilt of the bird makes some big heavy object either roll or move on rails to a new position that is beneficial." It turns out it's possible.
For the first situation, it turns out you can just go to a high point on the bird and glide down to the wing sections that normally require tilting.
For the "move heavy objects on rails/that roll" situation, it turns out there are ways to brute force those puzzles with Magnesis or Stasis.
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So like, I believe that Mary did it, but I don't know how anyone can do the dungeon that way and not be constantly thinking to themselves "surely this clumsy solution isn't how this room is supposed to work." I feel like the dungeon being full of things on rails REALLY implies there must be some mechanic to rotate the dungeon or at least magically influence those things all at once. It is signposted fairly well overall. I'll admit it's a little counterintuitive that a major mechanic is on the map screen and I don't think the Champions ever directly yell at you to check the map screen to do a thing, but I feel like if you check the map even once or twice, there's a pretty obvious "tilt" or "move" button that you don't normally have that should be pretty hard to miss.
I wouldn't fault the designers for Mary having a weird experience with the Rito Divine Beast. That just seemed like Drunk Mary talking. Or if that's also Sober Mary's opinion on Zelda just because there's a really janky way you can finish the Rito dungeon, then Sober Mary has bad opinions about Breath of the Wild. The devs clearly went out of their way to make it fairly tough to brute force without tilting. Gliding to the far underside of the wings is possible without tilting, but you have to already know what you're doing. Most of the portholes to the outside (that wind blows in from) are on an angled surface on the underside, making it hard to see from above and giving you a pretty small window to glide into it, but if you know where you're going it's possible. Like, the 8:40 mark in that video is pretty wild, blind jump stuff, compared to the reasonable difficulty of the actual solution. To prevent stuff like that entirely, they would've had to go to Portal lengths of just having video-gamey barriers that prevent your passage entirely or disable your glider for no good reason or something.
The dungeons definitely aren't perfect, and I noticed that if you do the Rito dungeon first and have Revali's Gale for the rest of the game, you can definitely do some weird sequence breaks in the other 3 dungeons. The dungeon designers want you to have to do a certain thing to reach a place and all of the surfaces are unclimbable because lol dungeon magic, but instead I was like "hey fuck you, what if I jump 100 feet in the air and glide anywhere I want." It's actually really odd that they disable Revali's Gale in shrines (where it would break/bypass a lot of puzzles), but don't disable it in the full dungeons (where it definitely breaks/bypasses some puzzles). Still, they're not as bad as Mary made them out to be.
Great stream, this was great after a lot of E3 business.
On the real, What's wrong with the noise Mary made? Was it a joke, it seemed like everything got serious quick.
Ehhhh, it's not that the sound is as bad as any of the really disrespectful, hateful racial slurs people can use. But most of the common imagery/sounds that Westerners associate with Native Americans are super uninformed and still kinda loosely based on typical Wild West, cowboys and Indians sorta Hollywood movies, or at best, maybe on Disney's Pocahontas or something.
So sure, some tribe somewhere probably had some kind of war cry similar to the noise Mary said (I assume there is some grain of truth to that), but whether it existed or not is not really the point. For decades, Native Americans in American media have had this broad stereotype of all kinda using that war cry (probably specific to a tribe from a certain region), all having big headdresses full of like eagle feathers and whatever (again, probably specific to tribes from a certain region, I think it's some of the Plains Indians), all using tomahawks (also fairly specific to tribes from a certain region), all living in teepees, etc.
So that war cry is kinda an easy stereotype. It's not that it's completely false, but it's one of the like, 5-10 super generic traits assigned to all Native Americans and is the way their culture was oversimplified for decades despite actually being a pretty diverse assortment of tribes and nations that covered super large, geographically varied sections of present day America and Canada.
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