Steve the Pocket

My first thought was that this reminded me a lot of Omikron: The Nomad Soul in its overall design and aesthetics. As things went on, it also started to remind me of that game in terms of how it gives you a bunch of objectives without any clear long term goals, expects you to do increasingly questionable things, and occasionally just breaks and doesn't let you progress without cheating. So if you've been seeing the other comments about Omikron and wondering if you should cover it for the Game Dungeon at some point, the bad news is that a lot of it is going to feel familiar and not in a good way, and the good news is that you at least have experience dealing with this sort of crap and pushing through it. Oh, but one nice thing about it is that you can hail cabs. I forget if it costs currency or not. Subnautica is still the all-time record holder for ladder fastness, although it might be cheating. "The hacker doesn't even ask why, and it highly implies he was never going to go above ground any time soon anyway." The most realistic thing about this game. "The vibe I got was 'You're here to bring down society; people are just props; keep your eyes on the prize.'" Sounds like pretty typical cyberpunk to me.

I feel like there's a better way to achieve a desired color palette than to just run the whole game through a post-processing filter. One that produces more natural results. Unfortunately it would require making it easy to adjust the colors of individual assets after they've been painted and plopped down into the landscape, and do so in a way that doesn't also just make them look they've been run through a post-processing filter. Either that or have very tight control over the asset development pipeline in the first place, and limit how much assets can be recycled across multiple zones. That last part probably isn't too difficult now that studios seem intent on procedurally generating unique textures for every single surface of the entire game, even though it results in games that clock in at over 100GB total and load times that test the limits of even SSDs.

I've definitely heard of this game before, but the name was so generic that I wasn't expecting a premise and story this unique. It kind of sounded more like Diablo or something (or at least half the clones of it you've already covered). Also, that cult leader boss would get along famously with Silver the Hedgehog. If you know, you know.

As soon as I saw that language, I lost any hope that this would end well. I'm not convinced a real lawyer even wrote that, let alone a competent one. People in the YouTube comments are speculating that it was churned out by an AI; my mind went toward that dunderhead that represented Vic Mignogna, the kind of lawyer who learned everything they know from TV and thinks winning cases is about making a spectacle of yourself and your client and God only knows how they ever passed a bar exam. (And if they did hand the job of writing their papers over to an AI, I'm probably still right about that last part.)

So I'm curious what exactly all of this is expected to accomplish, even in the best case scenario. Suppose we spend tens of thousands of dollars on a class-action suit and prove in a court of law that Ubisoft fraudulently marketed this game as a good we were purchasing, rather than a service we were subscribing to for a short term. I guess they'd be forced to either patch the game or offer full refunds to every single person who had ever bought it, and hopefully they'd decide the first option was the cheaper one. But that's just one game. Do we then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars going after every other company that's ever shut down a game, using this case as a precedent? Because I rather doubt that they're all going to look at the case, go "Oh shit, we could be next," and preemptively patch all their old dead games just to avoid a potential lawsuit that, at worst, will just result in them having to do that anyway. Because if the goal is to stop companies from putting out games in the future that will be tied to online servers and prone to being shut down... that's not going to happen. They'll just stop fraudulently marketing them as goods being sold, and instead find other ways to make money off them. Subscription services and "free-to-play" are just going to become the only way to play games online. They've been transitioning to this business model for years now; all this will do is put the final nail in the coffin for any other type of game coming out of the big-budget industry. I took Ubisoft's own announcement earlier this year as a statement of intent to do just that.

If I had a nickel for every time I've seen Steve Jobs' likeness used for a fictional tech company head, I'd have two nickels. Also, with all the talk of brain uploading, I was expecting the game Soma to come up. Since it didn't, I'm guessing you haven't played it. And since you clearly have thoughts on the subject, I think you should! Oh, and I'm curious what your source is for the claim that Carrington-class events happen every hundred years. I know we had a near-miss barely a decade ago and that the "original" Carrington Event was over a hundred and fifty before that...and the trail goes cold beyond that point. Also are we or are we not counting the ones that did or will miss the earth in that figure, because I think that's a pretty big asterisk.

Quoting posts is broken. The link just jumps me to the top of the page.

On the subject of games being plagued by problems that run deeper than the obvious ones, I can think of two examples off the top of my head. One is 2006's Sonic the Hedgehog, whose issues are constantly blamed on its tight deadline... and while that explains the many, many surface level problems (I still enjoy stumbling across new Let's Plays of it because of how every single one manages to trigger a brand new bug I'd never seen before), the game is such a fundamentally unworkable concept that the only way a relaxed deadline could have saved it is if Sonic Team had had the liberty of scrapping the whole thing and starting over. There are people out there trying to remake it in the modern Sonic engine, and I can only shake my head at the polished turd I have to assume it's going to end up as, if they ever finish it. The other is Five Nights at Freddys: Security Breach, which I found a video on recently expounding on how it's a case of "concealing problems within problems" and how it's many bizarre and inexcusable bugs just mask the developers' utter failure to understand how to make a game. I haven't actually tried playing either of those games myself, mind you. I don't have the iron constitution for these sorts of things that you do.

Oh hey, Outdrive! That's the DeLorean-driving-into-a-generic-80s-wallpaper game I'm pretty sure I (mis)remember Totalbiscuit doing a quick-look video of. Man, I wonder whose video that actually was... Relatedly, does anyone know where that background (palm trees, segmented sunset, wireframe ground) originated? It's become such a cliché that it wouldn't surprise me to learn it's entirely an invention of the modern era and that no such image ever existed in the actual '80s.

On the Videos page, clicking any of the numbers at the bottom just reloads the page of most recent videos even though it changes the URL in the address bar. Thought you might want to know.

It's dawning on me recently just how many Diablo-inspired games Ross has played on the channel, and that it's probably one of his favorite genres. I wonder if he's ever played Magicka. It's not nearly as fun in single player, and isn't really balanced for it either—not only do the enemies not get any less tough, you lose out on the infinite revives you can use on each other, instead only getting a Navi-inspired fairy who gives you one free revive per checkpoint—so he might want to drag a friend or two along. The twist is that instead of having any RPG elements, an inventory, or even much loot beyond occasional replacements for your melee staff, you're a wizard with an arsenal of elemental spells that can be combined in fun ways and then cast either directionally, on yourself, or as an AOE. So for example, Arcane combined with any other offensive element usually creates a powerful beam of energy, but add Shield into the mix and now it drops tripmines. Your spells can even combine with those of your teammates to create more powerful attacks—or backfire hilariously, if you're not coordinating properly. Oh yeah, and for some reason they decided to save on voice acting budget by having the language options only affect the captions, and so as not to favor any one localization, all the voice acting (which features fully unique clips for every single line of dialog) is in comical gibberish. And because the development team is based out of Sweden, that gibberish came out sounding like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.

They might have kinda-sorta ripped off Monkey Island's music in that one place, but it sounds like Michael Land returned the favor; the track used in the underground salesman-world (and heard again at the end as you're giving out the awards) reminded me of the beach club theme from Curse. Also I was thinking Roger Rabbit when the purple dragon started talking. But I do kinda hear the Ed Wynn similarity. I remember back in the very early days of Rob Paulsen's podcast Talkin' Toons, they talked about how voice actors trying and failing to do an impression has sometimes led to an iconic performance in its own right. "A bad impression is a new character" were the exact words. That's stuck with me, and now I wonder if that's what happened with Roger. Wouldn't be the first time someone's impression of Ed Wynn has been bad enough to become its own thing.

Something I never noticed before is the parallax scrolling of the mountains and clouds. That's pretty advanced stuff for 1984, just two years into the computer's lifecycle! Even if they do tend to bounce back when you stop moving for some reason. And while some of the weirdness with the controls appears to be down to the emulator mapping up and left to shift+down and shift+right, respectively, I can't explain the rest. If it were a joystick #1 game I'd just put it down to input conflicts, because that was something the shoddily-engineered breadbin was known for and the reason so many games defaulted to joystick #2 instead. Is there maybe some kind of advanced programming technique for polling keys that's faster (gotta save those extra cycles for parallax scrolling, after all!) but results in polling a whole group of keys instead of just one?

That just raises further questions!

Ended up rewatching this because YouTube recommended it and I've lost track of which of these generically-named games are which. And I noticed something this time: the opening cutscene, the map, and the prophecy scroll are all rendering at what looks like twice the vertical resolution as everything else. Which would be 320x400. How the...??? What kind of system even supported that, ever? It's not one of the standard 13 VGA modes, I can tell you that much. And in fact the screenshots ultrayoba posted above appear to be the same way. Did this studio figure out some kind of wizardry that the rest of the industry wasn't privy to? Might explain the awful framerate, at least. Updating all those extra pixels takes time.