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.

I'm surprised you're not that knowledgable about David Cage, Ross, since, uh...he's kinda infamous these days. I won't explain, however, since Fahrenheit has given you a half-correct impression of him. Probably better for you to remain blissfully unaware of the full picture.

Maybe it's because of age restrictions on YouTube? Have you tried youtube-dl?

Good episode, Ross. I have Trickstyle on an old physical copy in addition to digital (I think), so the EXE replacement might be great (I'll have to figure out WINE and possibly DGVoodoo, though). I'm legit surprised there seem to be few hoverboarding games, I thought it'd be a more common sub-genre since it seems like such a slam dunk. Could just be that people need to warm up to skateboarding games again (which a game like this kind of is, from a fundamental perspective), plus also the slow-burning desire to return to the Y2K aesthetic. It could also be that people would rather play a Wipeout-type game than this, but it's hard to say.

Eh, doubt they'd get claimed, I don't think stock music was as much of a thing back then--at most, you had stock samples, and even for something like Lemmings that had royalty-free music, the composer still had to actually arrange the in-game "instrumentation."

God, I was hyped when I saw this on the blog page. This game fascinated me since I first heard about it one time. It's fascinating how they managed to achieve such an open world at the time. This game could really use a remaster with the better-quality FMVs from the 3DO version (I don't know why they apparently compressed them further for PC). I would recommend checking out PO'ed, which was another 3DO FPS I actually had a little experience with, but there is no PC version (a DOS version was canned), leaving only the original 3DO version and the PS1 port. If you do ever decide to look at it, I will tell you that it is wacky.

I think Stadia might have a chilling effect on game-streaming services, because all the news media focused on Stadia, from its launch all the way to its failure. It's been a high-profile thing, and while that might have still been the case even without the media getting involved, now it's likely that few will try and jump into the space, not when their potential customers' first thought is "isn't this like that Stadia thing that Google killed?" When even Google decides it can't stay in a field, that might discourage other companies from trying.

I think all preservation will ultimately be quasi-illegal if not straight-up illegal if copyright and such aren't reformed.

I looked up this game, and I was shocked to see it came out in 1997. Every problem Ross had with this game, Command & Conquer had already "solved" back in '95. Heck, Dune II already solved a lot of the UI issues. This game seems like the only good thing it has going for it is the art and graphics, which are legit neat. The XCOM-style strategic aspect sounded interesting at first, but the UI weirdness seemed to sabotage it (plus, is it really necessary to research a thing in every city? Or to have to research basic things like infantry or power plants in the first place?). Speaking of C&C, the CGI cutscenes reminded me a tiny bit of Eric Gooch's CGI work for the Westwood-era games, but upon reflection, they are more like the typical 3D you'd see in 90's FMVs.

The problem is that all AAA companies have moved towards the GaaS model as an outgrowth of the "always-online" DRM model. When every game is designed in a manner not too dissimilar to how MMOs were, there is nothing stopping the publisher from holding all the cards when it comes to you accessing the game. I know Ross made some good criticisms of the "boomer mindset," but I think the issue is that people aren't being boomer-y enough. We're heading for a digital dark age, popular culture is just kinda getting worse all around, and while enterprising pirates will likely keep us from completely losing a not-insignificant portion of our cultural history, it really does feel like there is little worth paying attention to past some point in the past 30-ish years. It's not enough to try and buy physical or pirate, one should just reject virtually everything that's new from the big corporations. Reward creators who aren't just completely recycling something old or who see you as more than just a wallet. Champion new ideas and original works. The problem there is that, for one, that kind of attitude is off-putting, and two, "new ideas and original works" for the past decade have been...mixed, IMO.

I thought that title screen was familiar. I suppose we have a new category of bad RPG now: Peashooter Minigun Games. On the topic of sexy armor, I personally don't mind, but then, I'd be the person to handwave it with "she can dodge lots of things" or "she has super regeneration" or "she has a personal force-field."