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Nerdist was started by Chris Hardwick and has grown to be a many headed beast.

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The Indoor Kids: OCD Gaming Moments with Film Crit Hulk

This week, Kumail and Emily welcome their good pal Film Crit Hulk to talk about all the obsessive achievement-hunting, score-beating, game-finishing moments of our gaming lives, from childhood on. Plus we also discuss Prometheus and Moonrise Kingdom.

 
PS: We know OCD is a serious disorder, and we are not making light of it.
 
Follow @FILMCRITHULK on Twitter!
 

 
42 comments read them below or add one

  1. My favorite part was where you guys were all picking apart Prometheus. I saw that yesterday, man it was so bad. The only thing that might have even partially saved it was if Charlize’s character had ended up the hero somehow. Noomi Rapace was incredibly annoying.

    Anyway, I know there aren’t enough hours in the day for this but it would be cool if you guys started a movie review podcast.

  2. The picture in Resident Evil was of Rebecca Chambers. It was in Weskers desk too, which is weird….. I remember playing ALL of the Resident Evil’s in order one weekend, and my OCD got really confused trying to get all the facts in each game to allign with the other games….

  3. I messed up like 4 or 5 times between 195th lightning and 199th lightning before finally getting Lulu’s weapon. Worth it.

  4. You guys are naaaasty! I will never look at a loaf of bread the same way again! Lol

    Question. Didn’t Lance Henrickson play Weyland in AvP?

    Also as a 9-5er, videogames act as an escape. I can’t cut Stormtroopers in half in real life…But…I do get kinda OCD when I play Gran Turismo. The game forces you to manage 5 or more different cars inorder to open up other tracks and challenges, and to be able to beat the whole thing. It gets to be alittle much, so…I use spreadsheets for my main cars to help me keep track of changes to upgraded parts. It’s crazy but also a testament to how much detail goes into that game where a minor tweak to say, brake pressure, changes how the car performs and can make or break your ability to win. To give you an idea, I have GT5 Prologue but I am still playing my original version of GT3 on my PS2. It has been years and I still haven’t beat it 100% yet. That game to me is just really well done and is worth going back to every once in a while.

  5. I’m really OCD when it comes to sports games. Mainly with franchise modes etc. I’ve mastered trading. One year in madden i made so many trades i had 10 first round picks….10 FIRST ROUND PICKS!!!!!! Need list to say, we won a lot.

  6. biggest ocd? I spent 3 whole fucking days on WOW in ironforge trying to catch a fish 39 hours! and still didnt get it, just watched hundreds of other people turn up and catch it in about an hour. It was kind of good tho made me see that i had a bit of a problem,

  7. I’m glad Hulk brought up Final Fantasy X. That game holds two of my “OMG, I’m a nerd, but accomplished” moments. The first being the lightning dodge. It took three tries, one of which I messed up at number 160, which is just completely defeating. The second is the chocobo race which I am convinced was designed as a form of torture. My wife had to put up with me throwing the controller several times trying to beat that race. It’s such a nerdy thing to get so excited about, but I guess that’s why we do it.

  8. Could David seem to be any more evil in Prometheus? All he needed was a sign over his head? Also, none of the characters have a conversation in the movie. It’s more like they’re talking AT the audience, and still the movie makes no sense.

    As for game OCDness. My problem with Fallout/Skyrim is that I become a hoarder about collecting all the weapons and items and I hat to get all the rings in the levels in the OG Sonic the Hedgehog game.

    Also, for some reason I felt the need to complete all the achievements in Bioshock. The only game I’ve ever felt that need.

  9. BEN Z + JOSH M – HULK SO GLAD HULK NOT ALONE ON THE LIGHTNING DODGING! SO CRAZY!

    GEOFF – HULK LAUGH. TRADING IN SPORTS GAME IS A TRUE ART AND THE KEY TO MASTERING ANY FRANCHISE MODE.

    STEPBOST – THERE A VERY GOOD REASON HULK STAYED FAR, FAR AWAY FROM WOW.

  10. WTF do you mean mustard doesn’t go on ham? Of course it goes on ham! It doesn’t go on Hamm, I think we can all agree on that. But ham? Smother that shit in that shit!!!

  11. There is a level of obsession beyond raising chocobos in Final Fantasy VII. There are rare items called sources that raise the hard stats of a character. A Luck Source raises a character’s luck, Power Source raises a character’s power, etc.

    Characters stop growing at Level 99, but they are far away from their stat limits (255 in most catagories). It is possible to farm sources from enemies in the sunken plane. You have to morph the enemies into items, and they become sources. Morph is an attack that does 1/10 the damage you normally produce. If you manage to kill an enemy with this light attack, the enemy will morph into an item. Do this a couple THOUSAND times to the tough enemies in the sunken plane, and it is possible to max out your stats.

  13. I guess I’m in the minority when I say that I loved Prometheus. The movie itself did give hints to many of the questions that it asked.

    The main theory as to why the Engineers are trying to destroy us is from a supposed cut scene that shows there to be a different sect in the engineer society that is more religious as compared to the technological side that is shown in the majority of the film. These religious ones are set on creating life wherever they can, while the engineers we see in throughout the movie are set on fixing those “errors”. There is the whole Jesus allusion that Ridley Scott makes which makes sense then with the need for thousands of vases of black slime.

    With Charlize calling Guy Pierce father, that was just to add fuel to the discussion of whether or not she was an android as well. David calls Weyland father as well and even calls Charlize mom at a couple points which could mean that she was an earlier version of android with different capabilities like being able to have sex.

    I’m not saying that it was a perfect movie, but it is far better than people are giving it credit for.

  14. I got Lu Shang’s fishing rod in FFXI. You had to catch 10,000 carp, IIRC. I also farmed up a pink tail in FFIV once. Once.

  15. The very last point that Film Crit Hulk was making (sorry that I blanked on the person’s real name) reminded me of this article in Wired http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/06/pl_column_toons/. I think as far as creativity is concerned, his gaming obsessions are allowing him to create his own worlds within the given game he is playing. Love the podcast and the video shorts.

  16. This is what I get for not hearing the whole thing before posting. Tony Hawk Pro Skater….do I have stories. I wouldn’t ever want to admit the amount of hours I spent in the first warehouse level just trying to squeeze out that extra point or two. I knew within the first five seconds of a run if it was going good and would auto-hit restart level if it went even slightly off.

  17. Haha I totally agree about Prometheus being terrible. I can put up with the aliens being enigmatic and unexplained, but nothing the human characters did made sense either! I wasn’t even that into Fassbender’s performance, he just seemed like an evil C3PO. He was the best thing in it, but that wasn’t much of a challenge. One of the things that stood out to me was how Noomi Rapace’s character was meant to be English but she couldn’t do an English accent. Why not just change her character so she was Scandinavian? It would have made no difference to the plot or dialogue. That’s a minor complaint but it struck me as a good example of the general laziness with which they treated all the characters in the film

  18. The Final Weapons in FFIX take literal YEARS – real time – to max out. It’s by far the most egregious example of video game OCD torture I’ve ever seen.

    Also, there is no god because of FFXIII. End of argument.

  19. That bit about playing the Franchise mode in Madden for the full 25 years? Ya, that’s me. Except for every sports game. Most recently through Football Manager and Out of the Park Baseball, where I’ve gone 30+ years of simulations in both. Even as a dude who’s always loved playing and watching sports, managing a franchise and creating a team was always my favourite thing to do. Kind of like merging my love of RPGs with sports games.

  20. BSG – THAT SOURCE THING IS MIND-BLOWING TO HULK! … ALSO RBI EDITOR LOOKS LIKE ONE OF THE ALL TIME GREAT TIME SUCKS.

    JOSH M – RIGHT ON ABOUT THE TONY HAWK RE-STARTS. WITHIN FIVE SECONDS YOU KNOW!

    GABBOMATIC – HULK LAUGH! FINAL WEAPONS IN FF9 COMPLETELY TORTURE.

    DANIEL TOTALLY AGREE ON FRANCHISE MODE BEING A MERGING OF RPGS AND SPORTS. IT A COMPLETE WAY TO LIVE OUT THE FANTASY OF WORLD BUILDING.

  21. My gaming OCD is currently in full-tilt as I am on my 3rd round of being obsessed with Skyrim. Unfortunately, Film-Crit Hulk, the strategy of making iron daggers doesn’t work well due to a recent patch that links smithing experience with the worth of the object created, so iron daggers and leather bracers ain’t cuttin’ it.
    I had a bout of gaming OCD last year when I decided to pick up Prince of Persia: Sands of Time again, and ended up going through the entire trilogy in the span of a week. I even got all of the life upgrades in Warrior Within to unlock the final battle with the Dahaka. The battle was so hard that I lost myself in it, and burned the pizza I was making. This is when I realized that maybe I was letting the games interfere with my life a little.

  22. This is more of a rage story than it is a “ocd” one, but it envolves the pigeon achievement in GtaIV. I looked for all of them, with no walkthrough and spent hours. I found all of them. ALL. But for some reason the achievement was never unlocked. There was a glitch that didn’t allow my game to unlock any achievement! I have a complete game with 0% trophy ! It was so infuriating that i have not pick GTAIV up since! :(

  23. I HAD to beat all of the character’s combo trials in Super Street Fighter IV, which took…a long…time, since I’m not usually good with those. The reward there wasn’t just surprising myself, but I can actually use some of the timing/execution I picked up in real competitive play.

    Film Crit Hulk, I also avoided MMORPGs for the addiction/obsession reasoning. Tried one once, actually, seemed kinda boring. I liked FFX, wanted to 100% it, but…I do have my limits. I am definitely interested in these Chrono Trigger texts, though, do you have a link that explains it more in-depth? I’ve beaten it a few times, but the soundtrack makes each replay worth it.

    I have found that I cannot deviate from my usual 100%-oriented-ness. A lot of games now have benefits/achievements for added replay value, and logically, if, on the first run, I got everything, I shouldn’t need to do it again, right? Well…not to some part of my brain.

    Also, for any fans of the original Deus Ex: most people know by now that you can make it through the game without killing anyone, except for at least one important character. You are required to do so to advance the story. Some players found a way to glitch the game into allowing the player to move on without killing the NPC, but it’s tricky, and the game’s story still maintains that you did, in fact, kill someone. I’ve…also run the game while trying to kill EVERYTHING possible.

    This was all before the achievement boom, too. Now, without the achievements to validate me, I’m not as interested in playing games in more creative ways. It’s kind of sad.

    For anyone interested in speedrunning, just look up speedrunnerslive or zeldaspeedruns dot com…both detail very, very difficult techniques that let the player (or speedrunner) break the games just to shave seconds off the last world record. Some stream themselves doing so live, which is somehow fascinating while you would think it might be tedious, to see someone constantly doing well, messing up, restarting, etc. For Kumail: Silent Hill 2 was beaten in under an hour. Yep.

    I could go on but I’m pretty sure I’ve already revealed how obsessive I am.

  24. I kind of love/hate that I totally relate to that Final Fantasy 7 experience. I still have my memory card with my saved game that has everything maxed out on it. Then again the amount of time I spent on that game is nothing compared to the number of hours World of Warcraft sucked from my life.

  25. I went in to Mass Effect 2 knowing that ‘winning’ in Mass Effect 2 meant a whole spectrum of outcomes, from everyone surviving to everyone, including you, dying. I was set. I was going to get every upgrade and min-max the hell out of the end scenario and get every last one of my crew back. Then I forgot to pick up Legion until after that certain point in the game, and I realised too late that I’d already ruined my OCD ending. I had to take a break, knowing how many hours back my other save-game was.

    Then I picked up Alpha Protocol on a Steam sale and never looked back. That game’s story is so flexible and reactive to your choices that you *can’t* get all OCD with it. You’re still a spy who get burned on his first mission, and you’re always going to visit the three hubs and go back home to settle the score, but the way it can play out each time is crazy.

    ——-

    Also, I’d probably be complaining about Hulk’s take on Prometheus if I hadn’t already read his critique of it first, where he had to opportunity to go into exactly what didn’t work, instead of just snickering at the worst bits of dialogue (not that the FATHER and the WAH, I CAN’T HAVE KIDS lines weren’t terrible, they’re just low-hanging fruit in a movie with much bigger problems).

    One thing about the ‘unknowable answers’ angle the movie shares with Lost was interesting. In the show, the main message seemed to be that the characters, even if they couldn’t get at the whole truth, had some comfort in a knowing that they played an important part in each others’ lives and in the saving of the island. You Can’t Always Get What You Want, and all that.

    Prometheus seemed to be saying “No, fuck you. Even thinking you deserve an answer shows how presumptuous you are, you dirty little ape.”

  26. The third person shooter with Tony Hawk style combo scores Kumail mentions is “The Club.” Its not a perfect game, but I liked the idea of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater action combos/ trick off lots of stuff in the environment style of game play being applied to other styles of game.
    Film Crit Hulk is a good guest! He knows the podcast, has listened to the other episodes, he’s prepared, doesn’t topic jump, and plays along with a good bit (even a bit about bread). I’m glad Hulk is in the guest rotation!
    I’ve spent 12 hours straight trying to get the Sword of Kings in Earthbound, a dozen extra playthroughs of Chrono Trigger trying to get the last ending I hadn’t seen (use a guide, you wont find it on your own!) and however many weeks it took to get everything in THPS 4 (secret hidden gaps and all, just to have the game status STILL say 99%) but these days there is just so much I want to do, write, read, watch, and play that most collect-a-thons and percentage point grinds just aren’t worth the time. Especially those GTA 4 pigeons!

  27. Hey this was a great episode. I spent 6 years attempting to beat Super Mario 3, every level, every boss, every airship in a frog suit.

  28. CHUCK – YEAH THAT PROBABLY A GOOD IDEA FOR PATCH. HULK GOT POWERFUL WEAPONS VERY FAST AND LOTS OF MONEY VERY FAST.

    LILA – OH GOD THAT HORRIBLE.

    ONRELOAD – HULK GONNA LOOK UP THE CHRONOTRIGGER TEXT THING. HULK KNOWS IT WAS RE-MENTIONED ON A EPISODE OF EXTRA CREDITS.

    ALEC – THE SAME THING BOTHERS HULK ABOUT THE MASS EFFECT GAMES. HULK ALWAYS WANTS TO COME OUT WITH THE BEST POSSIBLE OPTIONS AND SOMETIMES ME2 WAS STILL GOOD ENOUGH TO HELP HULK LET GO OF THINGS (THANE DIED BUT THAT OKAY CAUSE HE GONNA DIE ANYWAY). AND YEAH THAT WAS PARTIALLY HULK’S PROBLEM WITH PROMETHEUS. TO THAT MOVIE, AMBIGUITY WAS SOMETHING TOLD NOT SOMETHING EXPERIENCED.

    ERRATIC GORRILLA – HULK SINCERELY THANK! THE LAST TIME HULK WAS ON IT WAS HULK’S FIRST PODCAST EVER AND HAVING DONE ABOUT A DOZEN NOW, HULK MUCH MORE COMFORTABLE. PLUS BEING IN STUDIO WITH KUMAIL + EMILY REALLY HELP AND IT JUST FEEL SO NATURAL AND CONVERSATIONAL AND THEY SUPER GREAT. IT MAKES IT SO EASY FOR HULK! AND GOOD GRANOLA ALL THE GAPS IN TONY HAWK WAS HULK’S FAVORITE THING ABOUT THOSE GAMES.

    ROM174 – THAT IS THE FUNNIEST THING HULK EVER HEARD.

  29. Emily want to figure out something to ask her pal Hulk that will be impossible to answer in written Hulk form.

  30. That was a great podcast, loved it, and listening to Hulk (even in Banner mode) is the shit. Hadn’t really figured him to be someone who got all the rings in Sonic. I’m myself trying to keep OCD in check of sorts, hence avoiding most MMOs, especially MMORPGs, but on the other hand, while listening to podcast I was playing Minecraft, and this game is like OCD person’s paradise (or hell) – sometimes I get lost in caves just because I see yet another cluster of ore that calls for digging it out.

  31. My biggest “honour-bind” OCD situation was playing the Jedi Knight games. I got into this huge “Jedi Honour” mental construct where I had to use my saber correctly in combat or restart the level. If I rememer, my (entirely self-imposed) rules were:

    * Sabers must be dis-ignited at the end of combat.
    * If you ignite your saber by attacking, you *must* hit on that attack.
    * Hitting non-hostile NPCs (if you’re not playing deliberately Dark Side) is forbidden.
    * Saber-throwing is dishonourable.

  32. I really enjoy your guys shows and I think it speaks to how personable and engaging you are that there are times I want to be a part of the conversation. I agree Prometheus had issues but I don’t think it was as bad as you felt. There were a few things you missed during this podcast:
    1. mustard is a very common condement that goes on ham (not sure about Jon Hamm though)
    2. Waylen’s and David’s motivations are spoken to in the lead up, Prometheus is one of the few movies I’ve seen where the “hype” marketing lead in and have implications for the actual film. The TEDTalk by Waylen lays out the nature of the character and speaks to why he would do what he did, and in the David advertisment there’s a single line about being willing to do what your human staff can not do. It’s a throw away but it sets the entire tone of the character
    3. The goo is not a weapon, per say, it’s the same substance used by the Engineers in the begining. It is a weapon in the same way atomic energy is a weapon, it CAN be used but it can also be used for immense good.
    4. Scott is on the record as saying Jesus was an alien as were several other prophetic figures (as stated by a lot of the “aliens built my pyramid” crowds. There are common threads through history where there are recurring themes in seemingly isolated cultures with no contact which ties to the Atlantean diaspora theory of culture which I think is a load of bunk but makes for fun story telling especially if Atlanteans are aliens.)
    5. The idea that interstellar travel will not exist in 60 years is just backward, yesterday it was anounced that they think they may have found the Higgs Boson particle which could rewrite physics. My grand parents lived in a world where if you told them about computers and cell phones at our age they’d have thought you were crazy and if you told their parents about planes and automobiles they’d have thought you were crazy. So it’s not impossible, science often goes in leaps and fits not just a slow crawl.

    I’m not saying you guys were wrong, I actually agree with many of your points (though for some reason I think the pushups were a call back to Scott’s other work like the basketball in the begining but that’s just me can’t figure out why I’m thinking that, may be getting GI Jane and Ripley mixed up.) One suggestion I have if you want to read an interesting analysis that pulls out a lot of the references read this:
    http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html

    Scott layers his works so often there’s multiple layers of meaning, implication, and subtext (and then some times he throws you for a loop and just puts it right at the top.) I appreciate your opinions and want to thank you for sharing them, I just wish I could pipe up some times. :-P

  33. Film Crit Hulk (FCH), you forgot W-Summon. W-Summon+KnightsOfTheRound+Mime. And I had to fight in this one cave in the final crater with tripple materia growth weapons to grow additional mime materia. That took a lot of time.

  34. EMILY – WRITE HULK AT [email protected]

    ALEX – MINECRAFT ON HULK’S LIST!

    OBJECTIVE REALITY – THAT’S A TOTALLY AWESOME HONOR BIND. ANYTHING THAT FITS IN THE UNIVERSE AND TRU CHARACTERIZATION HULK SIGN OFF ON!

    MATT – ALL TOTALLY VALID POINTS. HULK TALKED ABOUT IT MORE IN DEPTH IN HULK’S COLUMN ON IT (AND EVEN RESPONDS TO CAVALORN’S ESSAY). HULK BASICALLY FELT THAT EVEN THOUGH THE IDEAS ARE TECHNICALLY “THERE”, THEY ARE NOT EXPRESSED IN A MORE MEANINGFUL WAY THAT SHOWS COHERENCE OF THOUGHT (HULK FINE WITH THE AMBIGUITY). BUT AGAIN, THE GREAT THING ABOUT PROMETHEUS IS IT INSPIRING LOTS OF INTERESTING CONVERSATION AT LEAST.

    OVERLOAD – TOTALLY. THAT EXACTLY WHAT HULK TRYING TO ARTICULATE AND WAS JUST GOING OFF BAD MEMORY. HULK THANK!

  36. Just read Cavalorn’s essay and it’s awesome but I must have missed some things in the movie. Where was it implied that the goo had the power to destroy and create in the sense that it took on the emotions of whoever was around it? One exchange that kind of set the tone for me was David and Heywood at the pool table. Essentially,
    H – “We want to know why they created us”
    D – “Why’d you create me?”
    H – “Because we could”
    D – “Imagine how dissapointed you would be to hear that.”

  38. I’m surprised you guys didn’t pick up on Hulks plot in Avengers. On the ship, EVERYONE was being tweaked by Loki. So while on the ship, Hulk was crazy and after he got off the ship, he was how he had been for the previous year, under the control of Banner. I always though it was obvious. Am I just over simplifying it?

  40. My greatest OCD pleasure is my NBA Live dynasty. I don’t play “franchise mode”, just one season from each year. Full 48 minute games, full 82 game seasons, Knicks. Compared to Hulk this isn’t actually much to brag about, since I’ve only played ’95-’99 thus far (started in real-time in 1995) and am looking forward to playing Live 2000.

    My Knicks devastatingly lost in ’95 to Orlando in 7 games in the Eastern Conference Finals, but since then have four-peated. What’s going to be really awesome is that NBA 2K12 has the entire 1995 Knicks team in the game, as well as the 1995 Orlando team. So at some point in the future, I’m going to play a full retro/present mix 2012/1995 season and have a shot at redemption.

    My blog goes into a detailed history about the seasons, and I would love to see Hulk do the same about any memorable sports game experiences.

  41. One of my OCD gamer pains is not being able to get all the upgrades in games like Arkham Asylum. To me, I understand that you need to work for the upgrades to not be too overpowered, but i annoys me when I have to sit for 15 minutes debating which I want.

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