Steve the Pocket

So I have to ask: How much modding was required for the crowbar-as-hammer thing to work? Up until now, all the custom stuff could be (and probably was) achieved with map edits, but I'm pretty sure this required brand-new code.

It took me until this episode to realize that the two heads in the logo are supposed to resemble the "circle with a thing sticking out of the top right corner" style of logos Valve used for Half-Life 2 and all the Source remakes.

It's more that people have a question, and don't even consider the possibility that the creator might have used the description to preemptively answer it. Even when that question is as major as "Who besides you contributed to the video's content?" and credits are a well-established thing in our society. To some extent this is YouTube's fault. From day one, they've considered the video descriptions so unimportant that they've been mostly-hidden by default. (And no other site does that. Not DeviantArt, not Newgrounds, not even Imgur which 99% of the time is just used to rehost other people's pictures for hotlinking elsewhere.) So people get in the habit of not even thinking about them. There are a number of ways in which YouTube is staggeringly backward, and this is one of the bigger ones. Anyway. Great episode. Like everyone else I'm surprised that you went to the trouble of having the game modded (well, custom-mapped) just for something so simple, but I guess we're all still used to the days when you didn't have the resources to do anything fancier than holster your weapon and noclip your way up a short wall. I'm guessing there are going to be more moments like this in store down the line. Which brings up a good question: Were there any moments in the first series where you wanted to do something fancy like that but had to do without?

I love how both games are considered notable enough to be featured on Wikipedia, despite being on the level of your typical Unity asset flip on Steam. Maybe someone should tell them? Also, TIL asset flips were already a thing over 20 years ago.

Something that finally dawned on me: This could work for a Christmas episode if you get desperate, because the soundtrack all comes from The Nutcracker Suite and candy canes appear in some levels as a paint-refill... thing.

You might have some luck hitting up the Vinesauce community. Vinny plays a lot of unofficial Mario games, from fan-games to parodies to knockoffs, so it's possible he's played this one at some point and someone from his audience remembers it.

Hey, I just remembered another weird old game that might be a good fit for a second Halloween sampler pack episode next year. Spooky Castle is a top-down dungeon crawler thingy with prerendered 3D sprites (think Donkey Kong Country) where you attack by throwing an infinite supply of hammers. And the power-ups are "Pants of Power" and cartons of Chinese food. It's been freeware for some time now, and actually got officially posted on Itch.io, which I've never seen happen to an old game before. I've only ever played the shareware demo, so it's quite possible that it gets way weirder after that.

Did you lose a bunch of threads from the old forum? I'm seeing brand new threads being created for a lot of episodes that I know we had discussions about.

Oh! I just realized what would be a perfect episode for this show! Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Atari 2600! Everyone remembers the terrible licensed game that E.T. got, but they always forget about this one, which was... more ambitious, at the very least. It was a very early attempt at a Legend of Zelda-style action adventure game. You have an inventory of useful items, including a grappling hook; NPC vendors; and a wide variety of different locations you have to get through to reach the Ark. Oh, and did I mention it's a single player game that requires two joysticks to play? Yep, because joysticks only had one button, you used one to move around and use items, and another to scroll through your inventory—which was always present at the bottom of the screen—and drop items. Special mention goes to the manual, because it is a treat. (I was lucky enough that the person I got my system and games from had a collection of manuals in a bag, even though all the boxes were long gone.) As was typical of the time, the manual told you explicitly what every screen and sprite was because nothing looked like anything. Less typically, it had a section preceded by a spoiler warning that pretty much gave away exactly what to do at every turn. Again, because you'd have no idea what was going on otherwise. The only other game I can think of whose manual held your hand that much was EarthBound. I recommend hunting down a scan rather than consulting a walkthrough. It also has the worst rendition of a movie theme I've ever heard from a game. I first played it before I'd ever seen the movie, so I didn't know what to listen for, and I heard a completely different tune that started on the wrong measure. Oh, and Ross? In the off chance that you're actually reading this thread and choose to actively pass on the idea, could you let me know? Because if so, I may as well pass the idea on to the Stop Skeletons from Fighting guy to feature on his show Punching Weight. I think it would be a good fit for that show too but I don't want him to feature it before you get a shot.

Update on this: I have now watched the playthrough to completion, and I can honestly say this is liable to drive Ross insane. For one thing, there doesn't appear to be a full walkthrough like he had for Armed and Delirious; the player was taking cues from a member of his stream chat who apparently had beaten it and was going from his own memory. So if nothing else, I should probably try to remedy that. There's also one recurring section that requires such precise click-aim and timing that it's probably easier to rely on save scumming at every single step. And another that I'm pretty sure is genuinely random. But mostly there needs to be a walkthrough. I'll see if I can make time to play through it myself and document what needs to be documented. EDIT: Actually, where would be the best place to post such a thing? The game doesn't even have an entry on most of the usual sites. And yet it does somehow have a Wikipedia article.

If Ross isn't tired of point-and-click adventure games, I've got another one for the pile: The Adventures of Down Under Dan. It's a Sierra-style game in the sense that you can never be sure how many clicks away from a Game Over you are, or even if you've already screwed yourself out of a victory and don't know it yet. It has VGA graphics and OPL3 music mixed with full voice acting (in fact, the playthrough I'm watching doesn't even show captions, so those are at best optional), photo backgrounds and even FMVs in little overlay boxes. It's also kind of insane. Not constantly like Armed and Delirious was, but that just makes the crazy moments stick out that much more. One caveat I have to offer is that there might be issues with the audio. The playthrough I watched was running it in DOSBox, and several of the voice clips either got cut short or devolved into static not unlike dial-up modem noise. Though at least one of them played properly the second time around. So I don't know what's up with that.

It's possible. As late as the '90s they were putting "turbo" buttons on computers so people could run games that used the CPU clock as a timer (a habit the programmers probably picked up coding for microcomputers) and wouldn't run properly on faster hardware. Though I feel like if that were the case here, Ross would have noticed a discrepancy with the Amiga version. Unless he really didn't play it any further than the footage we saw...?

This is the first EGA game I think I've seen that uses a custom palette. Although it's not very customized; looks like they just did away with the cyans and purples and replaced them with an extra shade of gray, a second pale blue, a duller red (seen mainly on the big red ball in the splash screen), and that dull purple that the floor switches to around halfway through the video. Also, I'm not sure why a game released in 1988 wouldn't have a VGA mode. Any idea why the text in the manual constantly alternates between a regular font and a condensed one? It doesn't look like it was to save space, since the condensed lines have much wider spaces between the words. On the subject of fonts, though, I'm kinda digging the lettering they used for the in-game instructions and the pager message at the end. And it looks like it has all 26 letters. I might have to hop onto FontStruct and make a proper font out of it.

Ah, there's the crossover we've been expecting. And here I was thinking just last week that a Black Mesa style remake of Half Life 2 would have to be a lot less ambitious and focus only on raw graphical improvements because the original visuals weren't nearly as abstract and ridiculous as the Box Crushing Room. Clearly I haven't been paying close enough attention. But that's what you're for!

Oh. Something I forgot to ask before. You said of the jungle "Santa has no eyes here", which immediately reminded me of what Freeman said about Haiti: "Les yeux de Dieu ne regardent pas beaucoup là." ("The eyes of God do not look much there", according to Google Translate.) Are these both based on an expression I'm unfamiliar with? Google had no results for "God has no eyes here", and I didn't feel like punching in every variant I could think of when I could just ask. It's a pretty awesome way to describe a place as inospitable, at any rate. Also, did anyone else notice that the game is spelled "Captain Zzap" in the title screens, but "Captain Zapp" on the box art? Just another layer to the madness.

Games like this are why I don't exactly miss the "good old days" of game design. Sure, back when this was the best we had, games could still impart a sense of wonder with primitive graphics. But on the flip side, tough-as-nails first-person segments that send you all the way back to the beginning of the entire game if you lose once. And it's not like the game was punishing you for not being as adept as it expected. They were counting on you having to make several attempts to beat it; the whole point was to pad out the gameplay so you'd feel like you'd gotten your money's worth. But in the end all it accomplished was most people getting frustrated and giving up. Have to say, though, I kind of like the mechanic of making it a timed mission and then giving you a time penalty for dying. Imposssible Mission (now that might be a game worth Dungeoning, if you don't think it's too well known or straighforward) did the exact same thing. I like to imagine that time you lost was because they had to send a new guy in to take your place. Or I would, if it didn't explicitly contradict the lore in both cases.

Surprised Freeman didn't have anything to say about the graffiti that just reads "A GUN". He was staring at it for a good long while. It makes "YORE DEAD FREEMAN" look like great literature.

You've made me realize how much I want Minecraft to have pumpkin bombs in it. Might have to suggest that.

Ah, no wonder I felt like the only one not having issues. I'm on Firefox.

Gordon Frohman would be proud. Where did you find the killable-Vorts mod?

Something else I realized: In the first game things really were hectic and liable to catch people by surprise: The experiment going haywire, aliens teleporting out of nowhere, the army showing up to kill everybody... Freeman's response to his circumstances was pretty realistic, all things considered, and made him look like the only sane person around. Here, the circumstances are more straightforward—some kind of oppressive police state overseen by the guy on the giant screens, the former Black Mesa people aiding a resistance movement—and if it wasn't clear enough, NPCs are only to eager to spout exposition at the drop of a hat. So in order to keep Freeman reacting like he did at Black Mesa, he's having to be turned into the dumbest one in the room, willfully ignoring everything around him until the cops start firing.

It looked to me more like they were aiming for a CG version of the sort of weird cartoons that were popular at the time, like Ren and Stimpy or Aaahh! Real Monsters. I was going to compare it to The Neverhood, but apparently that only came out a year before this game, so too recent to be an influence.

Freeman's complete inability to be surprised or impressed by the miles-high futuristic structure looming in the distance really fucked with that part of me that gets mad at oblivious Let's Players. This is going to be an interesting ride. And I never realized how crazy-fast Freeman's situation with the cops escalates because, you know, video game, of course you expect to be constantly shooting at stuff. But even the marines in Half-Life were paced out more gradually. Although Freeman himself also wasn't in quite so much of a hurry then either.

I wish I had any reaction to this game besides "Wat." Because this is by far the most special episode of the series so far and it feels like it ought to elicit equally priceless reactions. But since I don't, let me instead take a moment to describe why I think adventure game puzzles frequently feature what's come to be famously called "moon logic." Not this adventure game, mind you; the reason this one features moon logic is because the designers were clearly literally insane. But others. The ones we consider "normal" by comparison. First off, puzzle design is just hard to begin with. You have to try to think like a player before there's actually a complete puzzle to think about. You can't just create an obstacle, decide what you would use to get around it, and then provide the player with such an object, because that would be too obvious. You have to obfuscate it somehow in order to make it challenging. So what designers tend to do is work out a series of moves that would solve it in a roundabout way. But now, by the very nature of what you're doing, you're no longer thinking logically. You're deliberately thinking illogically in order to arrive at a solution that's different from the obvious one. So you're expecting the player to hop onto that same train of not-logic to reach the same solution you did. And on top of that, many adventure games tend to be comedy games. Which means the solutions are meant to be funny somehow, so "normal" is off the table. But watching a character in a cartoon solve a puzzle in a silly way is very different from expecting a player to figure out that same solution. Because now you're expecting your players to all be as clever as a professional cartoonist. No, it's worse than that; you're expecting them to independently arrive at the same solution as a professional comedy writer already did. That's like sitting two comedians down in separate rooms and telling them they can't get out until they happen to write the same joke. And what's worse, even if they do solve the puzzle, it's still not going to be as funny as if they just saw it play out passively because, to them, it came out of their own mind. Very few comedians laugh as hard at their own jokes as their audiences do. This is why the greatest puzzle games of all time are still the Portal ones. Because Valve had a system in place where they spend 10% of their time actually building the game and 90% watching people playtest it. (Roughly. I'm using Fermi estimation here.) So even if they have no idea what they're doing, eventually they can stumble onto a good design from all the iteration. I seriously wish Valve would start making straight-up old-school adventure games, because I can't think of any studio better suited for it. Anyone else either wouldn't have the resources to do it the way they do or would be under pressure from the bean counters to keep development time minimal.

Oh hey, I completely missed this. The Helious rabbit hole continues to deepen; I wonder how long it's going to be before someone just straight-up streams it. It could make for a good charity stream, even, like they'll keep playing until they beat it as long as the money keeps coming in. Also: Woo, Jumpman! There's an obscure old game that could have been worthy of an episode.