T w e n t y S i d e d
Link (YouTube) |
Hey look it’s not Fallout 4 again.
Actually this episode is the result something Chris and I have been thinking about for a while now. There are a lot of games we’d like to show off or discuss in a bit more detail than you can manage simply by talking about it on the Diecast, but Spoiler Warning as a long-form let’s play series isn’t really the place for them either. So we’ve decided to take the “Twenty Minutes with…” videos that have popped up occasionally (pretty much every time Chris takes over as the player) and spin them off into their own series of Giant Bomb-esque quick looks, with perhaps a general focus on smaller indie titles that we don’t get to cover very often.
This will be purely supplementary to Spoiler Warning; we’re not going to stop our long form LPs any time soon. It also won’t necessarily have to involve the entire cast; just anyone who’s interested and available at the time. You might even see a Twenty Minutes With episode in addition to the Spoiler Warning episodes of a week, provided it doesn’t put too much editing strain on myself or Chris.
For our inaugural installment, I checked out Primordia, an old school-styled point-and-click adventure game about robots in the post-apocalypse, and I dragged Chris along for the ride. It’s pretty cool.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
I love how since they are machines, they use swears that would they would have heard coming from the mouths of programmers.
“B’sod it!” is something I seriously need to start integrating into my regular diction.
“Twenty minutes with…” video is 54 minutes.
I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT’S REAL ANYMORE.
When in doubt, assume some silly imperial units. :D
1 metric minute is equal to 2.7 imperial minutes! Simple really, when you know.
Don’t forget it takes 57 bips (or 13 avoirdutemps seconds) for one imperial minute, one long hour is 62.46 minutes and one short hour is 59.164 minutes.
It’s in keeping with Giant Bomb’s quick looks! I’m pretty sure they started with fifteen minutes. Now the average has got to be an hour.
What’s worse, Josh said this would be with “smaller members of the Spoiler Warning cast.” I thought that’d be Rutskarn and Mumbles.
Isn’t Mumbles taller than most of the cast?
Well yeah!
She is actually Optimus Prime, so she’s like 30-80 feet tall, depending on the artist.
Her voice sure sounds different when she’s been drinking though.
*Sues for false advertising!*
I looovvveeee this game.
While it does bare the sins of the past (finding some of the objects is a real test of patience), as Josh has said the characters, the art and the setting are all fantastic.
I thought it was so good in fact I started making a tabletop system based on it. Didn’t quite finish it as I moved onto other projects, but it’s always been something I’ve wanted to finish because this setting is way too good not to explore further.
I also recall on the creators website is a short story of a human crash landing on the planet and the wacky (I.E sad) adventure they have with a robot who’s kind of confused why they don’t just ‘fix’ themselves.
Oh man, I could see this being a great tabletop setting. If you ever get around to finishing it you would do the world a service to put up a PDF somewhere.
could you link me to the story, i cant find it. thanks.
Boop, here it is:
http://www.primordia-game.com/fallen.html
i love the whole back and forth partner thing that some adventure games use. Like i cant think of a game where it wasn’t charming. Sam and Max, Phoenix wright, Beneath a Steel Sky, Snacher, and so so many others did it so well.
The trouble is that it absolutely has to be done WELL.
If your sidekick’s smarm becomes annoying, rather than amusing, your players are going to have a bad time.
Barry Wheeler in Alan Wake (I didn’t even hate him that much, but I can see how he really grates some people). Luckily it’s not for the entire game.
I’m mildly disappointed Shamus isn’t here for this one, mostly because when he talked about about how there aren’t many sci-fi games that use technology to explore philosophical ideas this was the first thing that popped into my head. Am I the only person who gets a Torment vibe from this game? The more I think about it the sillier it gets.
Also Clarity is best waifu and I will defend that fact to the death.
I was thinking about replaying this game sometime soon, and this video is making me go reinstall it now, so hooray.
Except he’d also probably not like the personas of the robots. “Why would you program a robot to be religious? Or make dumb jokes? Or want arms?”
On the other hand,why would you program a robot to collect mugs?
That was explained: the reason was spite and jealousy.
Thats exactly what I was implying.Just because a robot acts in a way unlike a robot would does not mean there is no good reason for that to be a thing.
This video doesn’t get that far, but in the second half of the game
when you reach Metropolthe game gets pretty philosophical, albeit it doesn’t pontificate like Star Trek/the good parts of Mass Effect. It’s a solid critique of utilitarianism, and the “big bad” is a Free-Radical-SHODAN-esque AI who is another perfect example of an evil overlord dictator whose actions are more or less rational and logically explained.And again, the whole religion thing is explained pretty well between Ever-Faithful and the second area of the game.
EDIT: Also Crispin’s humor works into the mechanic where you can talk to him and use him for puzzle hints.
Primordia certainly has a lot of Torment’s DNA, and the developer has said that he was inspired by it.
I totally got a Planescape Torment homage vibe from this game…
– A protagonist who does not remember their past but who meets those who do
– An almost ever-present floating companion who ‘cracks wise’
– Progression through a broken world via dialogue and puzzles*
*Okay, there was a LOT of numbing combat in PT but that really was quite tangential to the experience for me… ;)
That’s about where I was coming from as well, since Crispin seems a lot like Morte and the multiple builds of Horatio seem like the various lives of The Nameless One. :P
So is Campster the weird one for thinking this game is pretty, or am I weird for not? The colour palette is a grey-brown soup to make modern military shooters jealous, and 640×480 is an ugly, ugly, ugly resolution. The pixel art of the main character works, but nearly every other surface is covered in jagged pixels that make my 2016 sensibilities think “Did I accidentally turn off anti-aliasing?”
I also hated Crispin: He’s clearly playing the role of comic relief, but I wasn’t laughing, which meant that every time he opened his mouth served only to ruin the tone the rest of the game was doing a good job building.
I mean if you don’t like good ole’ fashioned pixel art there’s no way you’re going to like this game’s artstyle. I love the jagged bare pixel style of low resolution sprite art, but it’s very much a taste thing.
Brown is a predominant element in the art design but the game does a good job with it. It’s not just a uniform shade of brown: it doesn’t do the FO3-esque thing of just having a layer of brown over everything. Objects stand apart from each other and the background by being colored in distinct brown/dark red/gray shades, though not to the extent that you don’t have pixel hunting, unfortunately.
I love Crispin, but that sort of smarmy little sidekick archetype is also something that is very much to taste, so you’re either going to love or hate him.
I like pixel art when it’s sprites, whose pixels have been individually placed. What I’m not a fan of is the fore/background design where an artist seems to have drawn a piece of art, then converted it to 640×480 without concern for whether or not it will create the ugly jagged bits that permeate Primordia.
As for Crispin, I don’t object to the idea of smarm (I loved Sam & Max), it’s just that every one of his jokes failed to land, which made me resent it whenever he talked (“Oh look at this asshole who thinks he’s funny”).
I don’t think it really does much with the colours, but the art style kinda reminds me of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Most 3D games don’t really play around with shapes as much.
I had the same reaction to the resolution. It’s weird to stick to conventions on that front. Whatever art you make, and this is some really detailed, nice stuff even if you don’t like the palette, it just plain looks worse filtered through this. I’m not a big fan of point ‘n click adventure games, but I have seen Quick Looks for some of the other modern ones, and they were wise to not all go this route. Maybe youtube is making the problem seem worse than it is, but I think it looks kinda muddy at the same time as the edges are sharp.
(I actually really like Crispin and think he’s funny. And I’m not some robot sidekick fan or anything, I couldn’t stand the Borderlands guy).
I think one of the issues is the screen people are going to be watching this video on, and playing this game are much wider and larger frankly then monitors of the old 640×480 era
Also things might appear to be stretched to fit making it look worse, youtube will have encoded it using there codex as well as the render and encode pass adobe/vegas does losing some detail and then upscaling it to 720p.
Also i think taste is a element here, some people will like it in part because it reminds them of the old 480p adventure games, because it is one basically.
There is a wrestling term called “living the gimmick” some wrestlers truly stick to their character at all times and in these days its rare, some fans love it, and some hate it. for example Matt Hardy right now lives the “broken” gimmick he acts strange with a odd accent and says cryptic shit always, and its very polarizing.
This game was made in 2012. This isn’t some relic of a bygone age, a modern developer chose that tiny resolution on purpose.
I think the point was more that if you were to look at this on an old monitor, it would look fine. It’s not really the game’s fault that you’re watching it at the wrong resolution. Maybe the developers should have been more conscious of how it looks on a modern monitors, etc. but on the other hand maybe they shouldn’t let something like that prevent them from following their artistic desires.
It’s like if someone purposefully filmed a movie with 1920s equipment. Is that a bad decision or just a part of the artistic direction? Not everyone will like it but is it a mistake? Or would it be a completely different film if it used modern technology?
A more extreme comparison would be if someone went out a picked berries and beetles and ground them into colored pastes and painted a picture on a rock. Would you feel justified saying that the medium was bad because their paint wasn’t smooth and had color variations and the rock was all jagged and uneven? Probably not. They chose the tools they wanted to work with for a reason and the tools that create a piece are as meaningful as the piece itself.
I think a big reason they went with the pixel art aesthetic, and one a lot of people don’t realise exists, is that it means they can get away with having fewer frames on their character animation. Horatio has 2 frames in his talking animation and around 6 in his walk cycle. If you did that at a higher resolution it would look choppy and horrible, but the pixel art look masks that effect.
I think the low-res actually fits with the broken-down, post-apocalyptic, junk-town aesthetic they’re going for. Like, everything is rusting, there’s a mix of technology levels everywhere (because some robots can’t afford the fancier stuff), and it’s a desert world. Low-res helps evoke the kind of feelings I think they’re going for.
If you have to ask,then its definitely you.
Joking aside,I am not overly impressed by this art.Its not terrible,but its not gorgeous either.And its not that I dont like retro pixel art,its just that this one looks generic.
I vote Josh for Giant Bomb.
But then we would know what he looks like! The appeal of the mystery would be gone unless he showed up in Tali cosplay.
I wonder what the overlap in audience is, actually. I’ve certainly been in Giant Bomb’s chat and got a “But what do they eat?”-reference before.
We already know what Josh looks like, just look at his black and white profile photo!
That… might have been me :P
Please keep ’em together on the SpoilerWarningShow youtube channel. There’s no sense in making people subscribe to more things there.
Plus, with playlists, it’s easy to separate things out, for people who want to look at the individual series’s. :)
Oh we have no intention of spinning things off into a separate channel, don’t worry about that. I’m not sure these things will be quite common enough to justify that and I don’t really see any pressing reason why this would need its own channel. So long as people are okay with non-longform let’s play content on Spoiler Warning in general.
Yeah, that’s fine. I find it really weird when creators spin off their own separate channel for anything even slightly different (looking at you, EmCeeProphit).
I watched a video recently where a youtuber talked about that a bit, apparently youtube’s ‘suggestion’ algorithms are sort of self correcting and the number of people it promotes you to is based on your recent view average and will taper off once you’ve hit that number. If they put side projects on their primary channel it means they see a reduction in new or casual (not subscribed) viewers on all videos, an issue for people that have quit their day jobs. I might have the specifics a bit wrong there but the bottom line is the same.
There’s also a few cases where the content is a bit more than slightly different. There was one recently where a guy (Lt. Eddy) who started his channel with animations with Source Filmmaker and then started doing gaming highlight stuff. He recently decided to split the gaming stuff to a new channel because a few people were subscribing for one type of vid or the other, so some people would leave for every vid that wasn’t what they weren’t interested in.
While I do certainly enjoy the long-form Spoiler Warning format, some of my favorite videos on the channel are the stand-alone ones: the time you all played The Yahwg. Or the time you all played that one Gary’s Mod elevator…thing. After X weeks of a single game (where X is ~6 or so), it’s nice to break things up a little now and then.
I realize multi-player stuff is inherently a lot harder because everyone has to have the particular game, and lag, and lots of stuff, but I’d personally love to see you guys do something where you’re all in a game world together, rather than one person in and everyone else commenting.
It worked for Killing Floor! Plus, there’s some smaller-scale multiplayer games, like Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime that would be perfect for a Twenty Minutes With format! :)
Y’know, I don’t think I’ve seen that episode, thanks for the link!
Mark Yohalem, the designer of this game, is also doing some writing for the upcoming Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Well, this was moody and neat. I like how the main robots are fairly normal people while every other robot are various levels of gone. Would definitely play this game with a guide like Campster, though. The point & click parts don’t look fun, they never do.
I’m happy you’re making this into more of a regular show! After last time’s Death Road to Canada I was hoping you’d do more Twenty Minutes Withs.
Having played this yesterday, the things I like compared to old point and clicks:
The puzzles are fairly straightforward, assuming you have a semi-decent habit of moving your cursor around to see what’s interact-able (like with Goliath’s finger or the notes on the floor) and what you can pick up. There are a few that you might not grasp right away, a couple where what you need is easy to overlook, and one nearer to the end that requires you to right click for a description (I didn’t even know right clicking was a thing you could do before that.)
If you get stuck, you can talk to Crispin and he’ll give a hint. Example, if Josh had done it while looking for the crystal, he would have mentioned you can’t lose something shiny like that forever. Granted, the hints are not always helpful in some cases where you know what to do, but not where to get what you need, but mostly the developers are good about getting into your headspace. (There’s a puzzle later where it allows you to try multiple wrong ways to get through a door to satisfy your thought processes about giving them a shot and moving on once they fail.)
They also keep track of important information in that datapad/map you pick up at the start. You can scroll through it to check info you may have forgotten or not realized you needed to take note of. It doesn’t do everything for you, though. There’s at least a couple spots where you need to pen and paper out your info to consolidate it into an answer. The map also lets you teleport to key places if you don’t want to deal with all the in between walking once you’re out of the wasteland.
One main failing I’d give it is the Item Use function. Once you have an item, or Crispin, as your cursor there’s no good way to change back to a normal cursor like you can in later King’s Quest games for instance. I had to basically open my inventory every time I wanted to stop trying to use an item on something. Keyboard shortcut made that bearable, but it’s still a bother.
There’s also an issue with the version of game engine they used where if you have more than 20 saves the game will crash if you try to load anything beyond the most recent 20. Doesn’t really come into play if you don’t save much or aren’t finishing the game then trying to go back way earlier to get an achievement or something. They know about it, but currently all you can do is delete the saves to bring the one you want to load into those most recent 20.
Also, go watch Heavy Metal (not the 2000 version). If you can’t find DVDs at your local library (or other source of free media), Amazon will stream it to you for four bucks.
Heavy Metal 2000 is still pretty good; Just not as good as the original. :)
You mean FAKK2?
No, no it’s nowhere near as good as the original. The animation is worse, there are too many callbacks just for the sake of callbacks, and the voice direction is terrible. I’m fine with Michael Ironsides as the baddie, but the reason the female lead sounds like a soft-core porn actress is because that’s what she did up to that point.
I’m not saying you fellow’s commentary isn’t enough – don’t get me wrong, you two were quite neat. : ) But, if you do another adventure game like this, what about inviting Pushing Up Roses? You folk do have a little history with her, and this is totally her thing.
Just a thought. I wouldn’t even know if she’d be able to do it.
One of the big problems with arranging SW is scheduling. And I think the idea of this searies is to stick to short episodes featuring a small cast that is interested in the thing being discussed to simplify scheduling. This basically could have been recorded at the end of one of Josh/Campster’s MP streaks because it struk them as something that might be fun.
I always said that they need to do a kickstarter to get Shamus to adopt them all.And seeing how his children are starting with the whole “get a job,marry and move away” business,he will soon have enough room to cram them all in without even getting a new house.
The sarcasm module came from Tom Servo!
So no Fallout 4 this week?
Also, Shamus, you need to make the author of a post more prominent because I was very confused as I read this post and thought “Why is Shamus saying ‘I checked out’, he wasn’t on this video!”
I noticed the author is listed at the top and bottom of this post, I wonder if that’s a site-redesign going forward or just for this post?
Surprisingly I actually picked up it was Josh straight away with this one, probably because it’s a ‘twenty minutes with’.
Most of the time I’m pretty sure I’d need a dancing emoticon banner thing to actually get it. Ruts vs Battlespire is another obvious one though.
That was great! I’m really enjoying this format alongside the longform LPs you do, and to be honest it helps to break up the monotony of the really long ones like Fallout 4.
Anyway, that game looked beautiful, but I especially enjoyed the music. I had to pick it up on Steam after watching the video, and I hope I can find the time to play it some day soon.
Human beings are so far in the past that everyone thinks they were a type of machine, nothing in this world eats, the only remaining books appear to be various programming manuals, so how does Crispin know what a gumball machine is?
This genuinely bothers me (as in upsets, not leaves me scratching my head). Screw Crispin and his lousy jokes undermining the worldbuilding.
I understood it less as “far in the past”, and more like “there were so many nukes and EMPs, that all the circuits got scrambled”. So much data loss, that only random bits and pieces managed to survive. Knowing what a “gumball machine” was (at least visually) never felt any more out of place, than Blue Screen of Death turning into an exclamation like when somebody in our world would say, “Good God!”, or “Cripes!”. :)
From the game’s store page:
Technically could still go either way, but I’m inclined to read the whole setting as “Even the post-apocalypse has been thoroughly scavenged and is breaking down with age” not “WWIII happened a few years ago.”
“everyone thinks they were a type of machine”
I didn’t take that as them thinking that humans were literally robot/android things but more of a nod towards the singularity and attempting to be able to create something synthetic that can function as highly as a human.
So you’re saying that this world was the result of The Institute’s efforts from Fallout 4?
Thats whats bothering you?Not the “where are we going to find a workable computer” line,but the gumball one?
next week we’ll be doing fallout 4
You know, I get the feeling you guys are getting a little sick of Fallout 4. And so are we probably.
We’re prepping for the end run. Also Rutskarn was LARPing this week and Mumbles was out because she moved a thousand miles. So we figured it better to just take another week off and in the process make room for this. But yeah, it’s pretty normal for us to get sick of a game after a few months. Hell, we got bored of KOTOR, and that’s still a pretty great game. Better than Fallout 4 anyway.
What I’m saying is, a two week break is probably for the best. And then in four or five weeks we’ll probably be finished with Fallout 4.
Before the end, are you at least going to get in that “Help out the Diamond City radio guy” quest you’ve been talking about?
Are you going to do any of the DLC? It sounds like Nuka World is rage-inducing, which might make for some fun profanity-filled commentary.
I think one way to keep it fresh would be to drag in any guest commentators you can convince to join in. See if SuperBunnyHop or PushingUpRoses want to come back, or even try to get a new one. Shamus plugged a guy called Joseph Anderson a few weeks back who was absolutely scathing about Fallout 4 — having him along for the big reveal at the Institute would be amazing.
Josh: On a recent playthrough, I ran across something you might want to do just to show off a bit of brokenness in Fallout 4 (in addition to all the rest):
You need to string the Railroad and BoS factions along by being members of their group until you get the quest to destroy the Institute from within by helping a group of Synths to rebel/escape. You’ll be told to “Keep helping Father,” eventually giving you the quest to deal with four escaped synths at bunker hill. Father gives you the brilliant idea of not informing the Railroad or the BoS about this operation. Both are options, so I did both.You do get to see a nice 3-way fight between the BoS, Railroad “Heavies,” and a load of Synths. However, either the quest is totally broken or you must do the objective of the last faction you informed to “deal with the synths” which have escaped. In my game, you couldn’t do anything with them. They just stood there. Perhaps you could kill them (as the BoS wanted, since I’d talked to them last), but any other options you may have been given (help them escape, use a shutdown code for transport) aren’t available.
For the recall code option I think you need to keep the courser with you, to help them you just leave after killing the courser. It definitely feels really janky but did work fine for me.
As of the game I mentioned above, my quest log has three entries, and they read as follows:
Decide the fate of the escaped synths
Decide the fate of the escaped synths
Speak with Father in the ruins of CIT
That’s not a typo, I have two “Decide the fate” entries. The Synths show up on my radar, and when I speak to them, they thank me for letting them go, but the marker doesn’t go away. From what I read on the wiki, I’m supposed to lead them to safety, but it’s not letting me do anything, and they just keep standing where they are, their hands folded in a position of begging for mercy.
On the up side, thanks to the three-way fight (which according to the wiki happens anyway no matter who you inform, thanks Bethesda) there’s a HUGE amount of loot lying around on many dead bodies.
The wiki is wrong then, if you talk to them enough they’ll say something like “You get out of here, we’ll move on when you’re gone”. It confused me the first time I got there but the quests all resolved fine for me leaving them alive (cowering in fear in the basement) and going to see father with the courser dead. It’s definitely got a very unfinished feel to it but does work.
I think Bethesda were at some point toying with making a big deal of “Decide with your actions!” being a tagline but then shelved that and neglect to tell the player that they actually have a lot of agency outside of the conversation mini-game.
Three pieces of gordium conduit?Hah!
Spookily this game was released for iThingies just yesterday:
Primordia by Wadjet Eye Games LLC
https://appsto.re/gb/7KxVcb.i
So,spoiler warning has now branched off into advertising,eh?I knew Josh was a sellout,but Chris?That was unexpected.
Damn it, and I didn’t even get paid!
You need a better agent then.I suggest bender.
I may be wrong, but I feel like the Humanist bot’s head(?) is designed after a bascinet, one with a very pointy visor. Or maybe a different kind of helm, I’m not an expert. That, with the four legs and the pennant on his back, really accentuate his knightly feel.
Yeah, he’s got a really great visual design. They really put a lot of effort into world-building, and how this game looks. :)
“What do they do? Do they have an economy?”
Don’t you mean… what do they eat?
Fission chips!
this may be a very UK-specific jokeI still got it!
The ghost of Rutskarn’s puns from Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money salutes you.
Oooh, good one. *tips hat*
I’ve always been a fan of the Twenty Minutes With stuff. Taking smaller looks at games is always fun. It was also at that moment that I realized Twenty Sided -> Twenty Minutes With. Huh.
Anyway, off to Patreon.
Hello! I’m Dave from Wadjet Eye, the publisher of Primordia. Just want to pop in to say THANK you for checking this out. We’ve been huge fans of this site for almost a decade, so seeing a game from our catalog on here gave us a great thrill. Happy you enjoyed it.
-Dave
Oh, cool! You guys made a beautiful game!
You nearly lost me when you introduced it as a post-apocalyptic game. And then the characters have a thing called “unique”, except it’s some acronym that’s spelled wrong. Nope, I’m out. This game is obviously designed to trigger my pet peeves.
Six minutes in I stopped the video and bought the game. Will go back to watch once I’ve had a chance to play through. Thanks for introducing it!
Oh my god! Just when I thought they had finally gotten the notice that “X Remake: Now Dark and Gritty” is very deservedly dying out, they go and make one for Wall-E!
This is neat. The game as well as the format.
Bought the game as soon as I finished watching the video and just completed it.
I would love to see you do more of this game. There is a lot more here for you to sink your teeth into.
I second this. I watched the video, bought the game, and completed the game. I would love to see you do more with this game, and it’s a pretty short game so it wouldn’t take that long.
I really like some of the endings.