incorrectdigit

I feel like Ross nailed some of my experience game. There's a lot of personality and good here, and a lot of, for a lack of a better term, jank. I played the actual gamecube game and later the pc and I can confirm what was said in passing earlier, the PC version is built on an earlier version of the engine and has way more jank. There are a lot of 'automatic' sections that fail for seemingly no reason. And inputs sometimes just do random things because it does have the problem of, in trying to make a simplistic control scheme, having certain buttons do too many things that if it does the wrong one, you die horribly, notably switching rails and jumping off rails. Personally I found the best way to make sure I mostly did what I wanted to do, was to make sure that the stuff I wanted to do, I took a quick breathe before doing anything, too many inputs too quickly really makes this game upset. Want to switch rails? well make sure I took a breathe after switching a rail, or doing the hoppy acceleration thing. The second thing that it took me a while to realize is how super super important the attack upgrade things are, it changes the damage and the visuals and even mechanics of some of the moves. You get one by going through checkpoint with a character, or in certain balloons/item boxes etc. . . and each c haracter can hold 3 (it shows them on the thing) it turns tails air attack from absolute garbage to perfectly good. a lot of the 'dashing off or hopping off cliffs' is something that's plagued 3d sonic for a bit, some of it is acceleration and just the game not always handling speed well. Given how big an improvement sonic heroes is over adventure in the sense of feeling in control of the character it's a good step forward, but it is something that for the most part gets better, like generations had much better 3d controls and platforming. Depth perception/the camera are big enemies, or were to me too, and again I think that's some just due to nature of 3d platformers at the time, and good cameras being hard at the best of times, it's an art where it feels the divides keep getting bigger, but it's hard to really appreciate a great camera because it feels that's how it should be, and very very easy to recognize a bad or shakey camera. In the end I always felt like this was one of my favorite 3d sonic games, I loved the aesthetics, theming, and personality of the game and it's like, if they spent a year or two refining or rethinking some of the ideas, it could be one of the best 3d sonic games very easily. personally I remembered thinking the 3 teams should have been the switching, like a speed team, a flying team, and a fighter team and having the mechanics and exploration be drastically different, but then there is this issue that it'd be hard to get people to really want to play something other than speed team. in the end, it's flawed, and in some ways massively, but when there's good, there's so much good. And also, Ross, I have no idea why you had an aversion to checkpoints. Did they say something mean to you as a child? Did you just hate that they almost always came with a dialogue line? I think you really need to s it down with your therapist to hash out this clearly deep seated issue.

Well Ross, I threw your infographic up on the nerdiest place I know, the Linus Tech Tips forum, if I see any interesting hits/responses I'll drop them here. (For reference, topic here: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1213607-super-weird-and-specific-mouse/ ) This was DM'd to me, if you don't mind vertical mice Ross: https://www.amazon.com/Evoluent-VM4R-VerticalMouse-Ergonomic-Connection/dp/B00427TAIK

I recently saw this also going to tweet it to the twitter, but think it's incredibly relevant https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2018/02/26/museum-let-us-play-network-games-legally/ edit: ah, apparently they've been flooded with this article, so I'll leave it here for others who don't know, but sorry for the repeat message Ross!

Having been one of those people with no life and too much time, ThANkS foR SINGlING us out Ross, we're not crazy, NOT CRAZY. Anyway onto: STORY TIME WITH DIGIT. To give a little background, I was one of those rare flowers who was actually in the World of Warcraft beta, playing on the only realm Argent something or other. I remember Captain Placeholder (a fun story with a silly song, look it up!) and when Warcraft had no exclamation points, they actually added that in shortly after launch. I was in a guild running for world first Onyxia kill as the heal lead. We were 3rd to take her down ever, and second our realm by 15 bloody minutes. So that's kind of my pedigree for the story, started super hardcore and gotten less hardcore with every expansion, that guild fell apart shortly after that onyxia thing destroyed our spirits. So we fast forward to Wrath of the Lich King, where my 3 best stories happen. Story 1: That retarded horse. It was at this time that World of Warcraft was starting to experiment with supplementing the subscription with microtransactions, their first grand experiment? A purchasable mount, purely cosmetic, in fact looked weird when it first launched. They took the most difficult mount to get at the time (Invincible, a wing-a-ling undead horsey from the Lich King himeslf) used the texture off the hard mode only boss of ulduar that had become a bit of a legend by then (Algalon) a made made of stars, mashed them together, and created the celestial steed. (They later cleaned up the texture and his animations, so he looks better now than he did) All for the low low price of $25, or $10 more than you pay for a month of gametime. Anyway, at the time, my guildies and I saw the writing on the wall, if this thing did well, it was going to meanhttp://a lot more negative things to come later. So we started the 3 month campaign of TRH-Free benefits. We farmed the rarest materials, and in bulk, we offered services for super cheap, ran people through raids, etc. . .if they let us look at their account achievements and confirm there was no TRH achievement. So we sold rare materials, gave free runs, etc. . . for 3 months to discourage paying $25 for an in game item. Sadly, it was incredibly successful and our guilds attempt to slow the rush, was only a paper holding back the ocean. Storytime 2: The Questining! After the failed campaign, our guild decided to spice things up even more! We were bored, the last raid was the only content we had seen in ages, and we needed...something to do before the new expansion came out. So we ran the longest quest chain in Warcraft history for 3 weeks. We had players around the world in specific slots 24/h a day (on multiple shifts so everybody's schedule worked) but always somebody there, offering you a quest, in the low level zones it was to kill 20 bears and get us greys, and then they point you to the next questgiver with the 'quest item' (usually a vanity item, so we could confirm they'd done or at least really knew about the quest.) so, you do the quest in the lowbie region, and slowly go through ~60 something quests to the Final Quest, defeat 3 completely deranged madmen in LIVE FINITELY COMBAT *Awesome Music Plays* (This was done in Dire Maul Arena, an area that forced pvp, even for same faction, even on non-pvp servers.) So we had 3 jibbering mad-men attacking the quest taker and each other, and the reward was 50,000 gold, a 2 mounts worth about 25k. The first person to clear it ever got a vanilla wow collector edition code, to claim one of those super rare pets. It was feel good times. STORY TIME the 3RD: Undergeared So, while my main guild was getting bored enough to make a game with-in a game, I was reading blogs, lots of blogs, writing in blogs, creating a blog, blogs blogs and blogs. I ran into one, ye olde Greedy Goblin. A blog mostly dedicated to discussing the economics of WoW and how to make money fastest/easiest with the auction house. He was starting an initiative though, Undergeared. A raid group designed to clear Wrath of the Lich content in only blue quality items. To explain, there had kind of become this odd requirement for random groups, you had to have a 'gear score' (item level of your gear, as calculated by a mod, and later added to the normal game) of ____ (usually higher than what the dungeon even dropped) to get into the group. This practice eventually got so crazy, this goblin decided to prove that this expansion, unlike Vanilla and TBC was more about good gameplay than the gear you wore. So we became Undergeared. For a little background in Wrath of the Lich King, the normal 5 man dungeons drop blue items, with the final boss dropping a purple (epic) item. All raids drop only purples etc. . . And our mission statement to clear all the content in Wrath of the Lich King on normal without any epic items, epic gems (stat boosting items that were added a little bit into the expansion) or enchants that used materials -from- epic items. We would also do as much heroic content as we could. So we started, we cleared the first dungeons (Naxxramas, Eye of Eternity, and the Obsidian Sanctum) easily, even the hard mode of Obsidian Sanctum. KILL GET. Then we travelled to Ulduar, a raid kind of notoriously difficult. Designed around having purples from Naxxramas, but we cleared this too, easily, and all of the hard modes (save for Algalon) So then us mighty adventurers headed to Trial of the Crusader. This was a bad raid, designed badly, with badness, and was easily thwarted in normal by Undergeared. We didn't do heroic here, because we couldn't bring ourselves to do this raid anymore. ONTO ICECROWN. We entered Icecrown Citadel, home of the Lich King, with a little trepidation. This was the final raid (or so we thought) of the expansion. A multi-winged behemoth of a raid, and we were running with the blues of so long ago. Many people commented to Greedy Goblin's blog about how what we were doing was mathematically impossible to do in ICC. One boss inparticular (Rotface) had a mini-rage that everybody said would one shot our tank. But persevere we did. After 3 weeks of attempts we cleared the first wing. Then the blood wing (a coordinated fight called the 3 princes was best for our style, smart play greatly reduces damage taken by everybody, there's even an achievement for it!) and the boss, a vampire lady bites a person in the raid and gives them super damage! Then they have to bite a person, and then both of them have to bite a person later, etc. . . Then we went for the plague wing, where the dreaded Rotface lie. We cleared the first one, Festergut, and made our way over. We took our highest HP tank (a druid) and prayed, the mighty blow came down and left our druid with 7 hp, from 32,000. But he lived, well, he immediately died after, but he lived the hit! This meant we could do it, if we were awesome! So the weeks began. So the month happened. So the month and a half happened. WE WON, with only 1 person up, who fell over dead immediately. Then we slogged, and battled, weary, worn, tired. We got to the Lich King. We had proved ourselves so clearly, so cleanly. We had taken dungeon blues, and pretty much beaten the expansion. Gear score be damned! This expansion was about skill. But, all these weeks of tough fight after tough fight. Of the expansion of boring (not everybody was in my other guild, who was working to entertain themselves.) and we just had members dropping...we got to the Lich King, and impotently had to bow out, because we couldn't even get 10 people on to try. The rise and fall of undergeared. __________________________________________________________________________ So, those are my WoW stories. Some bigger MMO stories I was not involved directly in but know about or was part of the community at the time: Angwe, Ganker God of Warcraft. Many moons ago a force of nature rose from the ranks of the horde. Angwe, a rogue born to kill innocent people leaving Menethil harbor (level 30 zone) for the alliance. He became such an unstoppable force of nature that there were guides written on how to avoid him on the road (dive into the water and swim to shore, use certain cooldowns to hearth/teleport/stealth past him.) etc. . . It seemed this person never slept, never stopped staying there and killing for months. Good times Angwe, good times. The death of Lord British (Ultima Online) during Ultima Online's beta test, Richard Garriot came to visit his game and his people in a big event to see what was happening. A peasant used a very low level spell on him, and...he just died. The guy had forgotten to turn his invulnerability back on. So the godking of the game, who crafted a world full of lore and love, assassinated by his people just because they could. THANKS PLAYERBASE. Thistledown defense (Asheron's Call) - This is one of the stories I really feel should be out there more. Asheron's call held an event to defend these shards that would summon a great evil boss. Some players would try to destroy the shards, others would defend it, but in the end every shard would fall. Or so the developers thought. On thistledown server, players took the defense seriously, they levelled the shard up by killing themselves, making it more difficult to kill, and held on so well and so long the developers actually had to intervene to destroy the shard (I guess they never planned the content to extend to 'players defended the shard.' The last stand was so ridiculous and so great that a monument was actually created on the server engraved with the names of the people who defended it. Asheron's Call is kind of awesome. The dev's also plan to provide players with abilities to host their own servers when theirs shut down....this is cool.

I'll throw in my two cents (coming out of the woodwork to comment, partly because I think I really need to clarify my vote.) The three votes don't make a -lot- of sense, or more accurately, the third "I'm on Earth." This is what I voted, because there wasn't the option I wanted which was 'reworking the format slightly and a different game." I don't think the idea of moon gaming is a bad one, though it is different, which will always have some backlash at first from regular viewers. Currently moon gaming is kind of between your two most popular types of content, short succinct well written original videos/reviews (game dungeon/original machinas) that are short, and sweet. The other big audience you have is freeman's mind, where you kind of add a twist to what is essentially a literal playthrough of the entire game. This is heavily edited playthrough that is kind of like a longhand game dungeon. The choice of game was bad. It's essentially a bad shareware-like title, where you ran out of things to say about the game shortly after the end of the first episode. There's not a lot of downtime in all 3 episodes, but when you look at the commentary that -is- there, it's very repetitive. Play the drinking game with these 3 episodes: Commenting on blandness of backgrounds. Game mechanic that is frustrating but without any real insight (teleporters aren't consistent, though we won't say that we'll just say 'what?' maze levels that we won't discuss but get frustrated it's a maze, enemies that kill us super quickly without really discussing why, but we'll comment briefly on how all these things frustrate us!) Speculation on teddy bear alien society. After you die of alcohol poisoning, take a minute to reflect. Of those three options, only the final one really is trying to give insight into the title. And aside from a couple of relatively small asides (Ross discusses potential financial reasons why the game is in the state it's in. Brief discussion of why they chose the assets they did (ie: the target demographic) but these bits are few and far between. I feel choosing a title you feel you can really discuss all the way through the playthrough is a strong start. Try not to re-tread topics. The being on the moon gag also got really old really quickly, and was kind of creepy. Though that's my very personal opinion on it. My final opinion is: I'm interested in the format, co-commentating/sharing a game. Try to pick a more interesting game that either has a lot to talk about, or is short enough that with good editing there's always something new to talk about. Even at it's best, due to it being fairly differently paced to other content, I'd expect a little backlash from regular audience, but that's to be expected. TL;DR Ross is creepy on the moon, need a better game/unrepetitive commentary, slight rework of the format desired instead of abandoning.

Returning from the dead to comment on this one I think, great episode Ross, though the review might be biased due to my earballs bleeding from backgrounds and teleporting noises. Either way the only other breakout clone I can think of with story is Wizorb, but that's a bit too new and too rpg for this kind of series, fun game though, seems up your alley. I'm kind of always excited for what the next game will be brought back to life for me with game dungeon, I've only heard of half the titles so far, and it's great to discover other weird things that existed. Also love how you genre hop a lot, so we don't get the same kind of games twice in a row, this will always be a series I look forward to watching. Just, next time, please protect muh earballs.

Dear Ross: You do not have to dump water on your computer to take a break. Frying expensive components just to avoid recording is a bit extreme =) I'm sorry, I couldn't resist!

Dear Ross, I now have a desire for a Freeman's Mind Musical. I both curse and love you for this idea. Sincerely, Digit.

Well obviously the correct answer is to pressure Valve to release Half Life 2, episode 3, so Freeman's mind can have relevant ads. (Yes this is a joke response.)

Two things. 1.) This video probably has made me giggle more than any other april fool's joke out there today, though youtube's was awfully close. 2.) I feel so bad for your voice after that Ross, -my- throat was hurting by the end of it. Glad you found a way to get this released.

Well the lighting flashes mostly I think were the lighting glitches mentioned in the post about the tunnel. You've done a really well thought out post, I just have a couple of theories to throw at it. The Body - When I first saw this the first thing I noticed was 'no skin.' Then shortly after we see creepyman at the entrance/exit when he locks our favorite policemen in. I think perhaps something is well 'wearing' this man's skin. And the body was well, what's left of the man. More Oddities - More odd unsanswered things is where are all the people, and why does dispatch think these two are on vehicle patrol? Why does the last place they're in look like a bathroom? I have to admit it felt like a cliffhanger to me, partly only because I love creepy things, and the duo, and don't want to think of either as ending. But probably more because it has a very Penumbra/Amnesia (look these games up if you don't know them) type feel to it, and I want to discover the story.