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I was bored, so I went back and made some shitpost-level award graphics for each of the awards I gave (I would have added these via an edit but the site didn't like me doing that) Far Cry 5 [Coziest Game Where You Still Get to Shoot Dozens of People] [Love & Hate] [Diabolus ex Nuke] F.E.A.R. 2 [Whiny Game Engine] [Minority Report] [What?] Xenogears [Best Game that I Never Want to Play] Call of Juarez: Gunslinger [Death of the Author] [Drawn to the Horizon] [All-Time Favorite] SiN (+ Emergence) [Could've Been Legendary] [Best Saturday Morning Tone for Adults] [Best Main Menu Music]

SiN (+ Emergence) I have to give these games some awards, because I've had a very unusual relationship with this series ever since Ross introduced me to it. [Could've Been Legendary] - Both the original and Emergence are unique to me in just how unbelievably close they come to being all-time favorites of mine... but they're not. They just have too many problems. The tone, the setting, the overall feel of the gunfights, the level design, just about everything feels tailor-made for my personal tastes (Well maybe not the horny stuff. But it mostly gets out of the way when Alexis isn't on screen so it's not a big deal). But in both games everything starts to fall apart once they start trying to add a bit of challenge. In the original, for starters every time they try to add puzzles relating to unkillable turrets, the game immediately becomes a huge pain in the ass. And then in the late game everyone gets rocket launchers and sniper rifles, which is just not fun at all (And no, the "deliver cleaning supplies instead of weapons" terminal doesn't change that. I don't even know what it actually does). Meanwhile, in Emergence, the combat feels pretty consistently enjoyable (if a bit same-y) up until they start throwing the armored minigun guys at you, which again, immediately makes gunfights feel like a slog. They have way, WAY too many hit points, and the game's system of randomly spawning in enemy types for each encounter mean that they're never carefully implemented. They're just slapped in to artificially make fights harder. And Ross already mentioned that the personality of Emergence was being strangled, which absolutely doesn't help. Again, I've never seen a series that feels like it caters so much to my own personal tastes before breaking its neck on the landing. I genuinely believe that if the SiN Episodes series had not been cancelled, it would have become THE all-time favorite of mine. [Best Saturday Morning tone for Adults] - Unlike Ross's opinion on the writing of SiN (and Ninja Turtles), I actually really like this brand of goofy, straight-forward writing. Throw me in a world with a stupid villain who has a new crazy scheme every week, and is thwarted by some guys spouting one-liners and catch phrases, and I'll eat that shit up every time. In fact, I kind of lament the fact that this style of writing is very rare for stuff made for adults. Here's the recipe as I see it: It's the combination of heroic action, colorful characters, a stupid premise, and silly, overly-functional dialogue that really gives something a Saturday morning cartoon tone. And I think a lot of writers making stuff for mature audiences are afraid to put all of those things together. Funnily enough, probably the closest I've seen a game come to hitting this feeling outside of SiN is Call of Duty: Ghosts... if you can believe that. It obviously doesn't have the colorful characters, but it nails just about everything else, and as such always falls flat when it tries to take itself seriously. [Best Main Menu Music] - Obviously I'm referring to Emergence here and not the original since that's the only one that has menu music... but I'm not kidding when I say that the main them of SiN: Episodes might be my favorite song ever made, bar fucking none. Bear in mind that I'm not the sort of person who goes out of their way to find new music, and most of what I do listen to is stuff that doesn't have lyrics. So it's not like it's competing with a host of music where the meaning deeply resonates with me. But even with that aside... this shit is amazing. And I actually think it really fits Blade's character. Like his backstory is that he founded his own mercenary company as a response to all of the other blatantly corrupt security corporations cropping up. And this song really speaks to that underlying feeling of hypocrisy towards using the same systems of violence used by those corrupt businesses to try and fight back against a world that allowed it to flourish. But he feels the need to keep pushing back anyway because participating in that system is the only thing that's allowed him to rebel in any meaningful capacity. Like the song bounces between feelings of disappointment, resentment, frustration, hope, and pure adrenaline. I dunno, maybe I'm reading into this too much, but this is just a fantastic piece of music.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger [Death of the Author] - I've seen games and movies where the narrator is telling the story in past tense as we watch the events transpire. I've never played a game where the narrator slowly has an existential crisis while telling the story, watching the gameworld fall apart as he drops everything to ponder his mortality for a moment before someone gets him back on subject. [Drawn to the Horizon] - The vistas in this game are absolute top-notch stuff. Even if this game's sketch-outline aesthetic isn't your favorite, you have to respect the artistry that goes into the landscapes here. I mean just look at these mountains here, the sense of scale is stunning. [All-Time Favorite] - I did not in a million years expect this to become one of my favorite shooters. Like, it's a budget 4-hour title that uses the common modern shooter tropes of regenerating health and ADS (not that those are inherently bad, just often slapped into games without understanding what makes them work) and has a very slim selection of weapons. Now I have played Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood and enjoyed that quite a bit, so I was at least expecting this to be good. But sweet friggin' christmas... When you successfully dodge a bullet before being thrust into bullet time, turning the tables and clearing out everyone in the room, followed by the main character pausing the story to go take a piss... You'll understand. Everything in this game just fits together perfectly in a campaign that is all-killer, no-filler. Go play this.

Far Cry 5 [Coziest Game Where You Still Get to Shoot Dozens of People] - I've never played a full-on shooter game that felt this comfy before or since. The whole game, from the environmental design, to your interactions with NPCs, to the ability to relax and go fishing or hunting, everything just gives a sense of hominess and community that almost reminds me of Animal Crossing on a certain level. But the core gameplay still revolves around shooting people and beating them with a shovel. I guess "Cult of the Lamb" is something that more deliberately tries to replicate this dichotomy, but in that game it almost feels like the division between "comfy community builder" and "murderous cult leader" is played up for laughs. Meanwhile, FC5 merges the coziness with the combat pretty seamlessly. [Love & Hate] - Far Cry's formula (at least post FC3) is kind of like comfort food to me. It's not likely that anything using this formula will break one of my all time favorites, but it's very easy for me to like. It doesn't take much for me to get absorbed in the gameplay loop and environments. Unfortunately, FC5, seems really opposed to me doing that. Not only does the game stop you dead in your tracks to force you into the story missions, but as you make progress in each section, the game repeatedly adds more and more hazards to annoy you. Especially the planes. Once you're close enough to a boss fight, you start getting hounded by planes circling the area 24/7, and no matter how many you shoot down, they'll always keep coming. But once you do clear a sector, then it goes too far in the other direction and nullifies ALL random enemy spawns, which just makes exploration feel a little less exciting. This all leads to a gameplay pattern where every chapter of the game starts at its best and ends at its worst, which almost makes me dread playing the missions and making progress. [Diabolus Ex Nuke] - The game's become kind of infamous for its ending, and spoiler alert, it sucks. It just sucks. If you decide to keep fighting the cult leader, which you are obviously going to do given how much work it took to get to him in the first place, nuclear war starts. For some fucking reason. There might be radio broadcasts about political tensions being high, but that still doesn't explain why you only get hit with a nuke if you decide to kill this random cult leader in Montana. F.E.A.R. 2 [Whiny Game Engine] - You might recall in Ross's video for Revenant, he called it one of the most temperamental games ever made. Well, FEAR 2 is definitely up there.. Instead of behaving differently depending on a series of tiny differences in your system, FEAR 2 has two modes of behaving- it runs or it doesn't. And all too often, FEAR 2 chooses "It doesn't". I suspect this is less prevalent on other machines, but man, there are SO MANY things that can cause the game to just refuse to launch. I've had times where it just works without a hitch, sometimes it only runs if I set the game to my native resolution ahead of time, but other times I'll try reinstalling both my graphics AND audio drivers, and it STILL won't work. There is such a long laundry list of things that can cause this game to boot up to a black screen that this alone makes it hard to recommend someone buy the PC version. [Minority Report] - Most people seem to regard FEAR 2 as an inferior sequel... I am not most people. I mean sure, I agree that some things aren't as good, such as bullet time being a bit less polished, and the horror elements not being as strong. But on the whole? I think it's a tighter and more enjoyable experience than its predecessor in a myriad of ways. Environments feel much more varied and interesting, the combat is still a ton of fun, the slide kick is way, WAY easier to pull off and therefore is infinitely useful. Hell, I even like the inclusion of proper aim down sights (Although they still should have added an option to disable it). And even if the horror elements are less prevalent than before, I didn't really care since I didn't think the first game was even remotely scary. There was a handful of moments in extraction point that creeped me out a little, but other than that, I have no fucking idea what people are talking about when they say FEAR is a superb horror experience. It really never was. So having the sequel recognize that and use the horror as more of a thematic anchor felt like the right direction for me. And all that makes the "Whiny Game Engine" award all the more frustrating, because I WOULD play it a lot more if it would let me. [What?] - Yeah, I'm not gonna try to defend the ending. Whoever drafted that is a crazy person. Xenogears Just one for this game, but it's a good one: [Best Game that I Never Want to Play] - Do you ever look at a game, appreciate the aesthetic, tone, characters, and story, and then think to yourself: "Too bad it's in a genre that I don't give a flying shit about actually playing". That's the vibe I get from Xenogears all over. Even as someone who doesn't usually like this game's brand of super metaphysical narrative, I found myself supremely interested in the game's world and characters. Not to mention the overall art direction is just fantastic across the board. Unfortunately, it also uses just about every JRPG gameplay trope that I don't care for. Static turn-based combat, random encounters, bad pacing between cutscenes and gameplay, all of that sort of thing. While there are some people who do enjoy or at least tolerate this style of gameplay, I'm not one of them. But hey, if someone were to make a fan game in this universe that plays completely differently, I'd be all over that like frosting on cake.

So in this video, Ross mentioned that Strife uses a medieval looking world where most advanced technology exists only in small pockets. Well, the neurons were connecting in my brain during one of my college classes and I realized something interesting. While that world aesthetic is relatively rare in a lot of western media, I recently noticed that there are *A LOT* of JRPGs that use this trope. And after taking a Japanese Culture course, it occurred to me that there are large chunks of Japan that are just like that. Not just in architecture, because a lot of old European towns definitely still have castles and cottages and shit. But like a lot of Japanese towns still practice traditions that might be *thousands* of years old in some form, except now you're sending RSVPs on your phone. I suppose my point here is twofold. 1- It's just interesting how this trope manifests much more frequently and with a slightly different aesthetic in Japan due to the environment they live in. 2- We don't even need a global catastrophe to create this aesthetic! All you need is a community that's stayed in one place for a very long time.

This is more relevant to the last episode but it's something I thought of recently. If in future episodes you need an explanation as to why the Gravity Gun doesn't work on enemies but it does with random physics objects- It's blood. That's the one consistent throughline with all the stuff the Gravity Gun cannot pick up. It can't grab anything that has blood. I don't really know enough science to give a reasonable explanation as to why blood would stop the Gravity Gun from working... but it's the only explanation I can think of. It still works on wood, so the difference is not "organic matter".

I was originally just gonna post this meme in the discord but I wound up putting way too much effort into it, so now I feel obligated to post it to the forum

Was Ross taking a jab at Civvie's recent halloween episode at the beginning there? Civvie covers a game where you spend the whole time in a spooky house and then it turns out to be a subversion of expectations and there wasn't actually anything supernatural... and then like a week later Ross makes a video where he's like "I don't want to make a video where you spend the whole game in a house and it turns out there wasn't even a ghost". Even though I liked Civvie's video that's pretty friggin funny if it was intended as a reference.

I sent an email to Ross a while back asking for his thoughts, but I haven't gotten a response. So I guess I'll just do a public post here. The short version is: Have we considered using voxels? If anyone here isn't familiar with them, voxels are basically just pixels in 3D space. You've probably seen them in some retro-esque 3D games that are going for a visual style similar to something like Minecraft. Cube World is probably the most obvious example I can think of. However voxels have much, MUCH more versatility than just blocky retro-throwback stuff. Computers now can actually render really detailed models using voxel geometry instead of polygons. And for a while, some lesser-known titles were using voxel based engines as opposed to polygonal ones to try and get more detailed environments. Nowadays because Polygons have become the standard and additional levels of detail aren't really that big of a deal anymore, Voxels have kind of fallen into a niche. Usually they're used for simulation games where updating polygonal 3D models on the fly aren't really an option. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with Teardown, and in my search I also found this: However both of these games seem to be low-balling what voxels are capable of. Here's a tech demo I found of a tank, and this is from over five years ago: And here's an example of Voxels being used to create realistic terrain on the Nintendo DS: I bring all this up because I feel like this is the easiest compromise for reading a 3D world off of a video file. For one, the AI wouldn't have to carefully construct polygonal models for everything it finds. It just needs to replicate what it sees: Pixels. And two, we don't have the special engines with advanced optimization tricks needed to generate those huge, detailed open world games... but voxels are capable of having a very crude level of detail system. As the object gets further away, just merge the voxels into fewer larger ones. The main thing I'm worried about would be Ross's obsession with Anti-Aliasing, because (and correct me if I'm wrong) I think most of the proper Anti-Aliasing systems in games these days rely on the model and texture data to get the best result. FXAA could probably be decent general substitute, but if you're in VR and you mash your face into something it's just gonna look weird.

I feel like Ross is just a guy who naturally likes working on stuff. I'm not too worried about him burning himself out, I think he's accepted he's just a workaholic. Which is fine. My main concern is that he feels really bad whenever he's not able to get videos out fast enough, that's what worries me. Because it's obvious that Ross is absolutely 100% a quality of quantity guy, but he always seems to regret not having the quantity AND the quality. That's gotta be rough, and I hope that's not related to any kind of social anxiety or something.

In hindsight I probably should have chosen a character with a more fitting face, but whatever, it was just a time-waster project. I didn't really have a good place to post this so I just figured I'd drop it here.