T w e n t y S i d e d

I know we’re nearly done with Until Dawn. But we decided to take a break from that because this week marks the 7th anniversary of Spoiler Warning. We recorded something special to mark the occasion. That will go up this Friday. In the meantime here is the first part of our 2017 new year stream:

And once again we run into the drawback of VR, which is that it’s very hard to share. For many people this is the only way they’ll ever get to see these games – including some great Portal content – but we had to switch to something else because too many viewers were finding it uncomfortable to watch.

“Hey. VR is AMAZING. You seriously need to check it out.”

I tried watching someone play a VR game and it’s awful. It’s like watching a half hour of shaky cam footage. Actually, I guess it’s not like that. It is that.

“Yeah, it’s hard to watch someone else play. But trust me, it doesn’t feel like that when you’re the one playing. When you’ve got the headset on, it’s nauseating in a totally different way.”

Is this a game about playing fetch? Are you kidding me? Like, fetch with a dog? How is that a videogame?

“I admit it looks boring when you’re just watching. And it’s true that normally first-person fetch wouldn’t be very interesting. But trust me, VR is incredible. You have to experience it yourself to understand why it feels so amazing.”

If you say so. I guess I could give it a try and see if… EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS? A VR headset costs as much as TWO consoles? That’s madness.

“I know it’s expensive now. But we’re still in the early adopter phase, so prices are naturally pretty high. Don’t worry, the prices will probably come down once there’s a demand for the headsets. We just need to wait for some good games to come out.”

A VR headset costs as much as two consoles and yet has less good games than the Wii-U, which was already a failure because of lack of titles?

“I know it’s overpriced, hard to watch, with very few worthwhile titles, but trust me. As long as you’re not one of the unlucky majority that gets VR sickness, you’ll have a mind-blowing experience.”

Technically our VR apologist is right, but this is still a massive barrier to entry. Having tried VR myself, I really want to see it succeed. But this is a huge hill to climb. I’m not convinced it’s possible.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The Firebat tells Chris, “The Wendigo, he keeps you alive and aware and feasts on your organs one at a time.”

Uh. Unless the Wendigo has a medical degree, he does either one or the other. There are a small number of organs you can live without, but if the Wendigo begins grabbing stuff based on convenience then you’ll bleed out, pass out, or otherwise stop being alive before he gets very far into the meal.

But I guess the Stranger got proven wrong less than a minute later.

It’s obvious he needed to die. Nothing kills the tension like having a hyper-competentWe’re grading on a curve, here. badass looking out for you, and nothing raises the stakes like the bad guys taking out your strongest ally. On the other hand, this couldn’t be more brute-force if the writer reached into the frame and yanked the Stranger off stage like an unpopular vaudeville act. He died pretty much the instant his exposition had been delivered.

If nothing else, cut to some other part of the story for a bit so the two things aren’t right next to each other in the minds of the audience.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The interrogation of Josh was pretty annoying because it kept asking you to choose between two things that said the same damn thing, and then Josh would reply with more crazy person nonsense instead of making his case. Josh could say something like, “Hey, remember your prank from last year that killed both of my sisters?” It doesn’t justify what he’s done, but it might give the other two something to think about.

Josh kept saying things that would enrage Mike. Mike was all bloodlust and no thought. Chris was constantly choosing between two things that don’t seem to matter. All of these things are justified, of course. Josh is crazy. Mike is a hothead. Chris is indecisive. They’re dumb teens and they’re acting according to their established character. This happens all the time in movies. Because of emotions, lack of information, immaturity, or character faults, characters often do things that are obviously counterproductive to those of us in the audience. In fact, that’s a big part of what drives this genre. “Oh no. Don’t go out in the dark alone. Just wait until morning.” Running against the wishes of the audience creates tension and suspense.

The problem is that this isn’t a movie. It’s a videogame. When you pop up a dialog choice like this, you’re getting the audience involved. The goals of the audience (stop people from being destructive) runs counter to the goals of the writer (smash characters into each other to create conflict) and it’s really hard to resolve that without situations like this, where the audience is frustrated with the offered choices.

I don’t know how I’d fix this scene. The choices are annoying. If you take them out you get a huge cutscene with no interactivity. If you make the choices better then they become false choices because the game won’t react to them. If you have the game react to them (perhaps Chris talks Mike into being gentler so they can properly interrogate Josh and discover he really wasn’t involved with Jess) then it would defuse this situation and avoid a lot of the chaos that follows.

Also, what’s the deal with The Stranger? Why is he trying to clean the monsters out of the mine? At night? Why not just seal it up? Or wait until daytime when they’re supposedly dormant?

Also also: Now that the big reveals have happened, I can say the writer has been cheating like crazy. In light of these revelations, the scene where Jess is kidnapped is total nonsense. Apparently Jess was grabbed by a monster. As we’ll see later, they can decapitate a human in one swipe. But instead the monster dragged her away while she struggled? And the Stranger was coincidentally nearby? He was close enough to the action that Mike thought he was involved, yet he didn’t hear the screaming or react? “Huh. There seems to be some sort of drama going on nearby. I guess I’ll make no effort to investigate. Instead I’ll just alternate between walking very slowly and then magically teleporting when nobody’s looking.”

I’m willing to allow for foolish characters, coincidences, movie physics, and characters that have trouble seeing things off-screen. But the writer still needs to obey the basic rules of time and space.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.