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So that was a videogame. That we played. For some hours.
Sad to see it end on a down note. It was a laugh at the start, but the end was a slog and it stopped being funny the moment it ran out of stupidThe awesome kind of stupid. ideas.
So that was Marlow Briggs. Our original plan was to play the game every once in a while, but I’m glad we just pushed through and finished the dang thing. I wouldn’t want to try and get through that final sequence once Josh had set the game aside for two months and forgotten how everything worked. (That’s what happens to me when I put a game aside for that long.) Playing in one-hour increments with a week gap between them seemed like a big enough handicap already.
Thanks for watching. We’ll be starting The Last of Us soon.
Footnotes:
[1] The awesome kind of stupid.
The Plot-Driven Door

You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout

Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Bowlercoaster

Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Silver Sable Sucks

This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry

Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Chris: …You must block and evade when necessary…
Me: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!
Yeah, uh, I don’t think I saw Josh block any time outside the few times the game prompted him to. Even on the enemies, like the Necromancers, which are all about blocking their shots. I think he just forgot the block button was a thing and went straight into Dark Souls roly-poly mode.
Which is wierd because in DS blocking is perfectly fine way of blocking damage, and is encouraged. Sure rolls are the best, but blocking is more reliable.
And he never made it to the top of the credits…
If he did, did anything actually happen or was it just the title screen? Also, was there any point to collecting those blue tokens?
I sooo wanted to see the end of those stupid credits! Josh, why? Why do you do this to us? You were almost there!!!
Well, Jesse Cox also did a playthrough, and it appears that getting all the masks and getting to the end gives you… nothing.
Of course Chris has a hat.He bought one to look like that dude from watch dogs.The one with a generic easily forgettable name.Adrian,was it?
I get all these “Dogs” titles confused, so I thought you’d be going for Dogeyes’ hat from Sleeping Dogs.
OH!MY!GOD!That ending is AMAZING!!And the credits,dear god!So fucking AWESOME!
Yup, while the mechanics were sort of meh the boss fight certanly was interesting and crazy. Also that plot sequel hook. You crazy crazy Slovenians, for this we are suspending stupid stereotypical Slovienian jokes for couple of days at least.
Indeed.We arent going to pick on the little guy.Whoops.
So can we posthumously declare this the official 15th season of Spoiler Warning? I mean, I enjoyed it (and think the game was better) then, say, Alan Wake.
Really I agree with Chris on a lot of points he made. I’m not a huge fan of God of War, but I’m a huge fan of skill-intensive character action games like Bayonetta or MGR: Revengeance. Most of those games also have similarly ridiculous stories with over-the-top (even more stupid awesome then Marlow!) set pieces but have a really solid and robust combat system to fall back on. Marlow may have gotten by without good combat if it was half as long and it could shove its legitimately good set-pieces closer too one another, but without either a short length or good combat it’s inevitable it’ll be the slog it ended up being.
I’d actually like to see you guys play a bit of a Platinum character-action just to see your reactions, but it’ll probably never happen since all new titles are exclusive to Wii U as well as are notoriously difficult even on the low difficulty settings. Anyways, can’t wait for The Last of Us!
Revengeance is actually ridiculously easy on the lowest difficulty setting (and even pretty easy on normal for most of the game), and is available on steam so could always hope for that.
It’s also ridiculously hard on the highest secret difficulty. Revengeance is a rare case of a game understanding what difficulty actually is. Cause it not only changes how much damage you take and deal, but it also changes the aggressiveness of the enemies. The lower the difficulty the more pause the enemies have in between attacks, giving you breathing room, but in that highest difficulty they do not have a pause and just go for you.
“Why does a Sesna have machine guns and bombs?”
Because a flamethrower would be impractical at that speed.
That obviously wasn’t a Cessna. The Cessna single-engine planes have wings that mount at the top of the fuselage.
Obviously, that’s an Aztec. One that’s been refitted to be single-engine, because reasons.
God those are the worst kind of pun. Those that require you to understand something completely irrelevant just to get a god wordplay. Case and point, the bheolder.
The Cessna had a machine gun because how else are you going to get a Cessna to decelerate at that rate, to make it go backwards? The GAU-8 minigun on the A-10 pushes a *twin-jet*-engined plane backwards noticeably (or so I hear), but the prop engine is a lot less powerful than the two engines on the A-10, so a much smaller gun is fine.
And the partly-angled-off-to-the-side shots are obviously how it moved sideways so … right-angled to the normally required direction of travel for a winged aircraft. Duh. :-P
Okay the top down shooter sections don’t fit in with the game, but Marlow Briggs is all about stuff that doesn’t fit in with the game.
So do any mythology experts know whether Heng Long was a Mayan god as well?
Because I was really hoping the final boss would be from some other pantheon entirely. Like, it would be Coyote, or something.
And I can’t tell if it happened or not.
Maybe he was the Mayan calendar.
I wondered if Heng Long was a reference to “You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance” from Street Fighter, but I doubt it.
The game had one cool idea left and it throws it at you as the hook for a potential sequel. For what it’s worth, I really liked the ending.
I did not see that end coming. If the studio made a sequel that showed they had learned from the problems this game had, it might actually be something quite good.
Marlow Briggs and At Least the First Half was Fun
I think if Rutskarn had been there his youthful energy could’ve helped lighten the mood.
That said, I liked a lot of the ideas here, but I don’t think I’d ever want to play Marlow Briggs on a PC. The control scheme seems better suited to Xbox.
Well I was playing it with a 360 controller the whole time.
I know; I was just speaking for myself as someone who doesn’t have one. To be fair, what I said was pretty unclear.
It’s not that bad actually, a bit finger-breaking at times, but works fine.
“microsoft studios sentient development team”
did I read those credits wrong or is that some area of videogame development I don’t know about?
Sentience is a good quality in a development team.
Well there is a Microsoft vegetative development team, but the rate at which they produce code is really unimpressive…
They keep making variations on Plants vs. Zombies.
But yeah, I tried to find sales figures for Marlow Briggs, but thanks to Steam’s popularity, all I see are when the game has been a part of a Steam sale and not how many units were sold.
I’m mostly curious to see if there was any increase in sales when this Spoiler Warning chapter got underway.
Ah yes, the team tasked with maintenance, updating and patching of GFWL.
Granted the earlier parts of the game were more entertaining, but thats true in most games. It was discussed back at the end of the DeusEx season.
I’d have to say as a Lets Play, Marlo Briggs is better than Skyrim. (Feel free to quote me out of context, internet.)
If you stop and think about it, that ending twist is probably the most refreshing plot resolution anyone could’ve hoped for. The mask-sidekick said the sacred warrior “saved his people”. The mask was using Marlo to save his lost civilization. Why would a god stoop to helping a mortal unless it was for their own benefit? For a goofy no-holds-barred type of game, that plot twist was pretty fantastic!
..I haven’t played Marlo Briggs, where does the final boss-fight rank against the one in Bayonetta where you fight the moon? Just curious..
If Marlow Briggs shipped with mod tools as extensive as Skyrim’s, it’d be PC Gamer’s #1 game of all time.
Even if the only mod was to reduce all enemy hitpoints by 75%.
If history is any indication (and if the game has a sequel that even comes close to historical events), Marlow would need the ability to grant the peoples of the Americas immunity to several diseases that wound up killing up to 90% of the indigenous residents in North & South America after the Conquistadors arrived.
And if the magic mask was there when Coronado showed up, why wasn’t he and his boat scythed in two? Is it because unlike helicopters they didn’t have a gas tank that could explode or what?
I’m getting the wonderful image of Marlow Briggs fighting giant bacteria and viruses, stomping them all to death one by one.
By the time the conquistadors landed it was already far too late for North America anyway. Though I can’t help but feel they didn’t waste something, just a little clever foreshadowing, if the girlfriend had turned out to be a medical worker/epidemiologist hired to control disease outbreaks in the workers, and *that* was how the Sacred Warrior was supposed to save the Mayans.
Of course then the villain would have no reason to kidnap her. Or at least not one that was so easy to write.
I did kind of like the Evil Dead “Oh no! I went too far!” time travel ending.
Aaaah, games that completely change the camera and/or controls for the final boss fight!
DOA3 had this terrible pseudo-chase-cam thing for the final fight where you couldn’t really see how close you were to the boss thanks to the perspective. Thankfully, you could cheese that fight by just repeatedly tapping the light jab button.
Ted Woolsey? TED WOOLSEY WORKED ON THIS GAME!?
My thoughts exactly. What the hell?
Maybe he did the translations from the mask’s native Mayan? Or maybe the game was originally in Slovenian.
Yeah, I caught that too. I guess he’s still getting work. Good for him.
I didn’t notice this until today, watching through this series again.
It would explain why this game’s tone is so weird, but also kind of endearing.
Im sad that you are doing Last of us next… since im gonna have to skip it until i play the game… It will be the first time i have ever missed a season too.
I agree with Shamus… I’m glad I watched this, not played it, at the start I was reaching for my wallet to buy the game, but by about halfway I was really glad I didn’t. It’s been a fun series, thanks peeps, looking forward to the next one!
Any other Warhammer 40K players out there think that Hellhound looked an awful lot like a Kroot hound?
Re: Josh’s belief that getting into a prop plane wouldn’t result in a flaming wreck:
– apparently, in the Marlow Briggs universe, all light aircraft are classified as helicopters.
I don’t think Josh believed that. What I loved was the hosts trying to make jokes about how dangerous getting in any aircraft in this game was, but the game beat them to the punch by calling the level “The Single Engine Coffin.”
They did? Dammit, I missed that one.
I wish they’d taken the joke to its logical conclusion though and had a horse riding level which ended with the horse exploding, just to underline that they knew what they were doing…
The MINECART blew up. If that isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what is.
I bet there’s a good ending where Marlo free his girlfriend and walks away from the boss fight. And I bet there’s a best ending where Marlo free his girlfriend, walks away from the boss fight and falls in the lava because he took the time to take out the boss’s first health bar. This allows Long to complete the ritual and ascend to godhood at which point it turns out he’s actually a competent and benevolent god.
So I’ve been wondering… why didn’t Josh ever upgrade his melee weapons? He always upgraded spells but never upgraded melee weapons to do more damage per hit. It’s a 2-4-8-16x dmg progression when you upgrade them. So after upgrading a weapon type (hammer) 4 times it does the same damage as 16x combo hit.
I know you are done playing it now so this info won’t help if you didn’t realize you could do that. But you’d have to be pretty oblivious not to realize it. Plus a tip if anyone else plays this game:
I’m totally fucking with Josh and lying out my ass.I think this entire season can be summed up in “And then Josh died”-Campster
Still, a mostly entertaining show, looking forward to the next!
I have a problem with the story. There’s a really big plot hole. Why didn’t Dr Girlfriend (who is the only source telling Long how to become a god) simply lie?
At points in the story she does lie as explained by audio logs. Like she tells Long to kill a jaguar instead of kids etc. (Really stupid to confess to lying in tapes could find them- but I digress.) Couldn’t she just come up with some elaborate ritual that ends with him plunging a sacrificial dagger into his heart? Then he’s dead because he has a dagger in his heart. If any mookes have a problem with it after they are more nuts than Long is.
Or even better, why didn’t the girlfriend arrange it so Long’s completion of the ritual granted HER the god-power? That would have been awesome, Marlo gets to the final boss and Long’s the one in chains and his girlfriend is the boss. :D
I enjoyed this season. I may actually pick up this game in the unlikely case I run out of games to play. It has some clear low points (dragon fight), but that final boss fight actually looked fun and it’d be nice to be able to hear the comedy dialogue instead of having to squint at subtitles while the crew talks over it.
It definitely does have issues, as mentioned. I think if they do a follow up game that takes some pointers from DMC and friends then it could be a legitimately good game. Stinger style attacks and other mobility enablers, as mentioned by Josh and Chris, could add a lot.