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.

Not gonna lie, the past few episodes had me so not-feeling-it that I was kind of dreading this one, but this feels like a return to form in a lot of ways. I like the way he's reacting to Grigori, like yeah of course the crazy guy with a gun who's narrowly avoided shooting him multiple times now is treated as an ally more than the friendly scientists he's met, because game recognize game. And the ways you're getting away with not resorting to using the gravity gun (like making explosions kill everything on screen without leaving stragglers) are subtle, clever, and feel natural. Presumably once we get to the next bit, you'll have disabled the infinitely-respawning zombies too, which should help a lot. For a peek behind the curtain, though, does Gordon actually run out of ammo at the exact moment he says "I'm out"? Or just close enough that you wouldn't be able to get through another encounter without a refill so you need to justify him not firing any more shots? Because if it's the first one, I can't imagine how many takes it took to not be stuck in a situation where there's an enemy still alive and no more bullets.

After reading through the last page, I decided to try downloading it myself and see what's what. I'm... not sure I got the same version? Mine has no voice acting at all, and the English translation is terrible. And there are no options to change this anywhere that I can see (the "Game" submenu in the options menu isn't even clickable). It just came as a file called "FRATER.zip" containing the installer, two BIN files, and the EULA on a PDF.

Oh, and this game was weirdly ahead of its time by offering a way to turn off the licensed music. I've seen some modern games offer that for the benefit of Twitch streamers, who are (implied to be, by the fact that Twitch hasn't been sued out of existence by the game industry) legally cleared to stream games themselves but not necessarily the music in them.

I rewatched this because YouTube recommended it and I didn't remember it very well, and one thing that struck me was the HUD elements in the bottom right, which I'm pretty sure I didn't even see before because they're so tiny. HUD elements not being designed to scale up isn't uncommon for PC games of that time, but what's odd to me is that it didn't seem to affect the on-screen text like those tutorial messages. Usually it's all or nothing with that stuff. Also I'm noticing some missing posts in this thread. While I, too, quickly got tired of Ratchet's immature posts and don't disagree with the decision to ban him, do you really think he deserved the "erase all evidence that he ever existed" treatment? Personally I'd reserve that for spambots. Even if they never posted a single thing worth reading, it's still useful to leave proof that the other people in the conversation were arguing with somebody, not just spouting random nonsense.

I remember watching Vinesauce play through some of this; you don't see many parody games out there, and I don't recall Ross covering any yet, so this could be an interesting venture into uncharted territory. I'm a bit concerned about the "6 playthroughs" thing; if the game isn't to his taste, even completing one of the quests might be a drag by the end, but it sounds like you're not properly covering the game unless you do at least one run through each quest.

As luck would have it, New Car Syndrome hit me when I was wandering through the thrift store's book section, and I learned that the "indigo child" isn't just something Cage pulled out of his ass. Rather, he pulled it out of someone else's. It's based on a new-agey idea that kids with apparent mental disorders like ADD are actually the first of a new species of highly-evolved, more spiritually-attuned humans who have, like, ESP and shit. I have no idea how this shapes the narrative surrounding this game, but it was interesting.

I assumed the temperature readings were in Celsius because Ross was playing the European release of the game (as evidenced by the title screen not saying "Indigo Prophecy"), which obviously would have used Celsius for localization purposes. 'Course, if you're gonna call the bloody game "Fahrenheit", and especially if it's set somewhere that uses that scale, it's still weird that they didn't have the temperature readings in F in all regions, with the C equivalent put in parentheses next to it.

It might not be a Christmas game, but it is oddly fitting for those of us in parts of the US right now, because it's been unseasonably cold here. It dropped below zero Fahrenheit (-15C) the past few nights in a row, and a lot of people are currently snowed in not because there's been a lot of snow (it was only a few inches), but because it's been too cold and windy to safely go outside to dig themselves out. We don't have to imagine what it's like to live in a supernatural ice age scenario this year! I don't have much to add, other than to say misjudging the timeframe it would take to get from New York to Area 51 is probably the most excusable of the obvious mistakes in this game. I don't know why Europeans would have an issue with underestimating the size of a country that a single glance at a globe would tell you is about the size of their entire continent, but apparently it's a common problem. Oh, and the big double-Simon HUD is the worst implementation of QTEs in any game ever for exactly the reason you described, and it's incredible nobody realized it. Or maybe they did and were like "OK but what else can we do? Our whole design doc hinged on this." ...Actually that's something I think needs to be brought up more often in discussions of badly designed games. I bet there are loads of games that reached a point where everyone involved realized there was no way it was going to work, but it was too far along to scrap the whole project and start over. Sometimes studios don't even have the budget to throw together a basic prototype before they have to start begging publishers for investment bucks, and at that point they have no choice but to deliver the game the publisher greenlit.

Yeah, Minecraft has historically had issues with multiple translucent textures (as in, those with full 8-bit alpha channels) rendering in front of each other—stained glass and water, for example. I forget if they've finally fixed it now or not, but it used to be that water would just "disappear" if you looked at it through stained glass.

None of them sounded familiar to me; what did you recognize?