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October Update: Back On My Bullshit
🕑 Added 2018-10-30 21:55:40 +0000 UTC Happy Halloween, Team!They Just Keep Getting Longer
Remember when I said episodes of The Alt-Right Playbook would be "short and to the point" and implied they'd probably average under 10 minutes? The next installment of is the longest one so far, which is what I said about the last one as well. I am currently 269 slides deep in this mofo and nearing the end.
You will get a rough cut tomorrow. How rough remains to be seen. A finalized version will go public sometime in the days following. I swear, somehow or other I'm gonna make the next one shorter.
(The funny* thing is, this video could have been quite short, but I used it as a jumping-off point to talk about a flaw in liberal thinking, which needed to get discussed at some point.)
Winding Down the Hype Machine
Earlier this month, Return of the Obra Dinn came out, which means...
...every game mentioned in my 2015 adventure game hype-list-of-sorts has been released (with one exception, which we'll get to). As I have mentioned before, I've been writing capsule reviews of each one as I play them (and a few other adventure games I've played along the way).
So far, I'd say Oxenfree, Dropsy, and - unless it whiffs the ending - Obra Dinn are the best of the bunch. Thimbleweed Park is the only one I can say I disliked, though many of the ones I was excited about were disappointments. Regardless, it's been an interesting few years for adventure games, and I've appreciated the various experiments with form many of these games have employed.
Regarding the ones I haven't played: The Mac build of Obduction is unplayable, the Mac build of The Witness is technically playable but runs like garbage on my machine, Nelly Cootalot I was supposed to play with my partner and we haven't sat down with it in ages (though we did get past the first major area), and I've started else Heart.Break() twice but it's really daunting at the outset and I keep getting scared off. Hopefully third time will be the charm with that one.
Finally, there's Lionheart Drive, which seems to be cancelled. Which is a super bummer. I was a Kickstarter backer, and we got a number of very cryptic links and videos and images, one with a password-protected zip file that, when cracked, had an endless set of nesting folders inside, so I somewhat suspect the game was secretly released a year ago and is at the end of an ARG no one bothered to solve. But we got a message a while back saying that the dev's creative partner and the musician for the project passed away, and I think that was probably the end of the project. Which is horribly sad, and the number of comments on the post saying "you owe us a video game" made me lose a lot of faith in humanity. There's no official statement that the game is scrapped, so perhaps it's still coming, but I'm not going to hold it against the dev if it's not doable without their partner. Backing a Kickstarter is always a risk.
Still, it looked like a fascinating game.
Anyway. For anyone wondering, I do plan on resuming Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood soon. I've been feeling a lot of nostalgia for times when I just made videos about adventure games. The ambitions of the channel have scoped up since then, and the political climate sometimes makes me feel like, god, who cares about video games right now? But I have at least one idea for an episode that is conceptually of a piece with the headier concepts the channel deals with these days. So maybe after this next batch of political videos is done we'll get back to the series.
Responsibilities
As long as we're talking about reviving old things, $10 backers got their first Behind-the-Scenes update in over a year! Still don't know when I'll manage time for annotations, but I have a few more BTS posts planned, and still hope to start working on the podcast in the new year. And I've got another goodie planned for the near future that I'll keep under my hat for now. >:)
Anyway, that's it for me, friends! Ping you tomorrow with the rough cut. <3
-I
* not actually funny
Comments
Kait Hatch
I LOVE OXENFREE! I played it back in November last year and *just* realised a week ago that I hadn't finished it. I mean, I realised as a concept that you could play it indefinitely and it would always be different, but didn't realise that it was designed to be looped as a continuous single game. So, having lots of fun with that right now.
alice
re: your thoughts ablut "who cares about adventure games in this political climate?" i do. i'm straight up suicidal these days. escapism? yes please, keeps me alive. not frivolous at all. 💗
Ryan Aston
It's been months since I played OXENFREE but I still think about it from time to time. What an incredible game that is.
Nikki
And, to make that clear again, this is obviously also very much a thing of opinion and taste. I wouldn't recommend this game to everyone for the same reason I wouldn't recommend Paranormal Activity, Shortbus, Hereditary or Infinity War to everyone. People look for different things in art and entertainment, and there's no judgement in that.
Nikki
Well, the game is not just about escapism. In reality, things also always do have explanations. They might just be very mundane ones based on human flaws and life's shittiness, and that's what the game is telling me. (I brought up my opinion without you asking, so please, bring up anything you can or want. ^^)
Ian Danskin
I mean, I *get* it, it just didn't work for me. I felt, if they wanted to sell me on the idea that Henry is trying to escape into a fantasy where he's the protagonist of some wilderness novel about a conspiracy and a mastermind pulling the strings, there should have been *less* of a reveal at the end. Because, really, there *is* a puppetmaster pulling the strings, he's just a mundane puppetmaster. I don't think there should have been a better conspiracy, I think there should have been *no* conspiracy, no puppetmaster, no discovery. Like, it's trying to pull the same trick as Gone Home where all the genre allusions come to nothing but that's actually more meaningful, but there's too much to the mystery to sell it. Anyway, that's just my opinion. (I'm going to assume you bringing it up is at least *kinda* asking for my opinion, and, if not, please disregard.)
Nikki
And PS4 (which is also a better way to play The Witness ;) ). If you don't have one, you'll need one anyway when Last of Us Part II releases :D
Ian Danskin
Hm, it appears to be Windows only. :-/
Nikki
I also want to recommend Fragments of Him to you highly. I'm pretty sure it's right up your alley; the visual style might be, hm, scary, but the content is just about something else entirely and it's really damn great. It's also the most progressive game I have ever played, made by a tiny team of two great guys. It includes homosexual relationships, bisexuality, even polyamory, and a lot of amazing "healthy" emotional behaviour. (Just... bare with the grandmother-storyline. It drags too long and feels over-the-top at times. It pays off, I promise.)
Nikki
Having read your review of Firewatch, what I found it to be "about" is, basically, reality. Things happen and you have to deal with them; you can try to escape them, but that won't work. Henry tries to escape something which definitely doesn't work, and Delilah has to face consequences of things she thought she doesn't have to care about too much. The ending fits this perfectly. Considering that people play games to _escape_ reality, I get why this doesn't feel too comfortable for many - neither would I play a game that's just me repeating my daily duties - but this game does a great job at still being enjoyable the way through while teaching (showing) you that there's still things to take care of. In this sense, you might see it as a kind of meta game too (even though I don't think it tries to be that). The final conclusion works perfectly for me, so if I see someone saying that they feel disappointed because the game teased a huge mystery to wait at the end without being one, it's hard for me to not think that they just didn't "get" it because that's kinda what it's about. (I won't say that directly though. Don't share your opinion on other people's taste if you're not asked. Also, people play games for different reasons, so this feeling is very short-sighted, as is often the case with feelings.)
Nikki
I'm a huge fan of Oxenfree. I liked it at first, but every time I watch an LP of it - or play it with someone else - it gets better and better. Boy, I should just play it on my own for once too... It's just such a polished and well-done game, and the voice acting is top notch. It should be for a game 95% of whose content is dialogue, but it's not always _this_ good. The Witness has developed to become one of the best games to turn off my brain with. I've played through it three times now plus once with a partner of mine, and it continues to be incredibly meditative and relaxing, and also challenging even the fourth time through. It gets easier, obviously, but it's impossible to remember all >500 solutions, so you still have to actually solve puzzles each time through, you just get better and faster at it and that definitely feels great. I also love the meta-content of the game a lot and the quotes mostly work well for me too. (God DAMN, Ashley Johnson's voice is just the BEST.) The first time I played Firewatch, I liked it a lot - including the ending. Then, as I watched Let's Plays, my opinion of it dropped a bit, mainly due to people's criticism of the ending. I always noticed that the most critical ones didn't quite "get it" (as arrogant as that sounds, and as inappropriate as that may be in terms of taste) though, and when I played the game with the partner I mentioned above, my opinion of it skyrocketed. They have a very own and incredibly immersive way of playing games, and besides the fact that that's incredibly enjoyable to watch, it also gives me more input and understanding of the content of the game. In this case, there was a LOT of great sub-content I didn't perceive the first time through (and it mostly falls away if you watch a Let's Play) - so now it's one of my favourite games of all time. And that's the same for the ending.
