T w e n t y S i d e d

This episode is two days late because YouTube upload was broken. So that was a great way to waste hours and hours of Josh’s time by making him re-encode and upload a huge video file when the problem wasn’t even on his end. Thanks YouTube!

This game is a poster child for the Quiet Time problem. It looks kind of amusing, but just watching it for an hour is exhausting. It’s a complete sensory overload of flashing lights and roaring explosions and particle effects and flying bodies and spinning platforms. If it wasn’t for moments like the brief block-pushing stuff this would quickly get intolerable. It might not be that bad for those of you watching the game twenty minutes at a time through our show, but I just watched Josh play for an hour and then watched this episode prior to writing this post, and my eyes and ears are sore. I can’t imagine actually playing the game for a couple of hours at a time.

Since none of us have played the game before, and since the story is a hyperactive stream of incongruous destruction, we have no idea where we are. Each week is a mystery. “Will we reach the end this week? Or are we just wrapping up the first act?” No idea!

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 hardest part of Marlow Briggs isn’t the combat. The hardest thing isn’t the environmental challenges. The hardest thing is explaining the game to other people.

The cutscene was perfect:

The evil bad guy is a dick to his subordinates for no reason. Then he demonstrates a power that – while impressive – doesn’t seem to have any immediate practical use. The main character stands by passively and watches the entire exchange without making any effort to engage these people he’s been chasing for the entire game. Nor does he make any effort to get within earshot, although I guess he hears them anyway? Then the bad guy uses his hoodoo powers on his men to… what? What does that glowing green puff accomplish? There isn’t any sort of transformation to indicate these men have changed. Then Marlow suddenly decides to do something, so he rips open a door and begins shouting at his foes to make sure they see him coming. Then the bad guys start, board, and load and launch their helicopters in the time it takes Marlow to run ten meters. Then Marlow makes no effort to catch his nemesis, the woman who killed him, or the girlfriend they kidnapped, but instead stops to fight TWO(!) mooks that aren’t even in his way. And then he somehow has access to a power he’s never had before, for no reason.

I realize being terrible on purpose is better than being accidentally terrible, but still. Not all of this terribleness is a joke. Some of it is just regular, garden-variety stupid.

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.