RocketDude

So, wait, is this based on the same source material as Kabus 22, or are they unrelated? I was thinking how funny it was that Ross has now covered two Turkish adventure(-y) games where the central worldbuilding premise is that most of the world has been united under a shady New World Order. This game has a lot to digest. The NWO stuff makes enough sense if you're familiar with enough of the conspiracy theory stuff, but the injection of Objectivism does confuse things. People need to be greedy in order to be successful at business and altruism is literally illegal, but also, citizens of the WU should donate to NGOs like not-Greenpeace? Are non-profits like that allowed because running them lets the people in charge gain social capital instead of money? Is the "debt to society" thing less of an actual social obligation and more of a guilt-trip thing to motivate people to make money? Why is the Sage perpetuating this system even though it is kind of bullshit and he's also in charge of the effort to keep the Sun from going red? (And also, if they plan on constructing an insane wormhole, why not just settle for space colonization at that point???) The fact that the intro clarifies that the existence of the World Union is a period of peace, but also devolution is interesting. Given the fact that the Space Race was labeled as a waste of resources, this all implies that the World Union resulted in something approaching utopia, but at the cost of human stagnation--an idea that I've actually been toying with in some fiction I've been writing piecemeal. I wonder how much of the weirdness is due to translation weirdness in either direction--this is a Turkish game, and they specifically call out Westernization in the same intro scene.

I finally managed to get through the other day, so now all I gotta do is wait a week.

What a strange game, indeed. This episode felt kinda weird and vague for reasons I can't quite pin down, but that might just be because all the English in the game is bizarrely vague. Kabus 22 joins gems like The Last Dead End, Dark Years, and Shankaram: Code Reborn in a rare group of Very Strange and Bad Eastern Games. Unlike those games, however, Kabus 22 doesn't feel quite so stapled-together in terms of technical execution vis-a-vis production values, it's just janky and stiff throughout.

Love the reaction to Freeman falling off of the building, though I'm surprised one of the medkits wasn't grabbed for that reason.

It's not really an Outrun-type game in terms of gameplay, but Victory Heat Rally is yet another game that's very much in the same visual mold. The palm-trees-and-wireframes combo aesthetic is probably not necessarily authentic, but the wireframe/"gridzone" aesthetic itself does seem to date to the 80's and 90's, as seen in things like home video company logos on VHS tapes or ads for early home computers.

A small list of ones that come to mind: -O of Destruction and Dead Simple from Doom 2 -That one map from We've Got Hostiles in Half-Life 1 where you go through it from the "ground level" at first, then come back to through the vents after going aboveground for a bit. I like that kind of "outside looping," seeing where you've been before from a new POV. -I think the Armacham Offices in F.E.A.R. are one of my favorite environments out of that whole game even though the gameplay can be bit up and down. The last couple of levels in the Auburn slums and the Origin facility are pretty neat, too. -Everywhere in Bioshock. Say what you will about the original Bioshock, I can't think of a single level in that game that I hated.

@kerdios I was merely suggesting a Reddit alternative.

Ross, have you considered anonymous question-asking services/sites like CuriousCat or Marshmallow?

I love the idea of these kinds of games. I normally don't consider myself that big on fantasy settings, but I love these casual "fantasy-with-technology" or "fantasy-with-a-modern-twist" types of settings, and this game reminds me a bit of Myth Adventures. Dragon-based postal systems, a mustard delivery service, and volcano dinosaurs? Heck yes.

I looked up Artbook Addiction, and I have to ask: will the chat be about AI art? Because he seems to be against it from a casual glance at his backlog.

Half a dozen other people to talk to? Man, how did these interviews come about? I can understand gaming-related chats or discussions about the legality of killing games, but how'd this all kick off? Was it all because of that one Q&A chat with the fans and it snowballed from there?

I could not finish this. I got an hour in and felt like things were going in circles a little. As for my own 2 cents: I think our understanding of consciousness and qualia and the like suggests that we shouldn't expect the AI to do anything without it being told do (i.e. motivation), though much like any motor, I think all you do need is the right nudge. I'm not a full-on doomer like Yud is, but I can definitely imagine some of the worst-case scenarios that have been posited, and it's possible that, even if powerful AGI lacks true qualia and consciousness and motivation, it'll still be a Big Red Button that could end the world. I mean, hell, Microsoft already kind of put it out into the wild with Bing Chat. We should at least promote not connecting these things to the Internet once they get scary-good enough.

YO WHAT

I could have believed he was genuinely running out of ammo. Anyways, good episode. I agree that this is really much like the old episodes of FM; the mental image of Grigori turning Ravenholm into a pseudo-Running Man set was amusing.

Yeah, I forgot to mention this...so when Ross joked about the Indigo Child being "pure of thought," he may have been more on the mark than he realized. As I understand it, certain tracks from Omikron are...infamous.