Tomb Raider EP23: The Ballad of Tom Braider

By Shamus Posted Sunday Aug 25, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 176 comments


Link (YouTube)

And so ends our adventure with Lara Croft and the island of misfit mooks. We were hard on the game in spots, but it was good where it really counted and salvageable (as a franchise) everywhere else. The gameplay is solid and the graphics are gorgeous. In an ideal world, the next game would require very little programming, they would finish in two years or less, and they would get this problem with tone nailed down so we know if we’re playing The Descent or Indiana Jones and Island of Shootdudes.

However, the next-gen consoles are coming, and I suppose some dunderhead somewhere in the chain of command will insist on more graphical bling. If I was on the team I wouldn’t mess with the art or rendering pipeline at all. I’d gently relax the polygon and texture budget, tell the artists to use more color, and then try to wow the bosses with technical buzzwords to sell the “new” graphics engine. That might be a bit “Emperor’s New Clothes” of me, but at this point I kind of suspect the people hooting for more graphics are the ones least qualified to tell the difference between graphics and art style.

(Well, I suppose someone needs to crawl down in the guts of the engine and find out what’s causing all this artifacting on the PC port. The good news is that I’ll bet every graphical glitch we saw in this season stems from the same bug. (And if you work at Crystal Dynamics and you’re looking for this bug: IIRC, every polygon explosion originated from Lara’s character model, and was usually triggered by a cutscene transition.))

We’re still haggling over what game we’ll cover next. In the interim we’ll probably cover Walking Dead: 400 Days, or Dishonored: Knife of Dunwall. But nothing is set in stone.

Thanks for watching.

 


From The Archives:
 

176 thoughts on “Tomb Raider EP23: The Ballad of Tom Braider

  1. Disc says:

    The video is still private :/

    1. HiEv says:

      Works for me now.

  2. Piflik says:

    Between these two I’d say Dishonored, since The Walking Dead was the worst season of Spoiler Warning, in my opinion. Not because your commentary was bad, or the game boring, but the opposite. The game is too much story and too little gameplay, and trying to follow both the game and your commentary ensured that I missed about a third of each. (Maybe it wouldn’t have been that bad, if I had played the game myself, though)

    1. newdarkcloud says:

      I think I would prefer a Knife of Dunwall playthough too. Out of the two DLCs, that one has a much more interesting contrast with the vanilla game than 400 Days. In fact, I like Daud’s tale much more than Corvo’s for a lot of reasons.

      1. Thomas says:

        I haven’t seen the Dunwall DLC so that sounds like fun, and it might be a bit more visually/mechanically interesting. 400 Days is a bit shallower because it’s more on an inbetween thing than a story in it’s own right

  3. Daemian Lucifer says:

    You guys joke about tom braider,but in my country,the majority of gamers call this series “tomb(said as a bomb,with a t) rider”,and I just cringe my teeth whenever I hear that.

    1. Halceon says:

      Oh yeah, same here. I’m just lucky enough that my circle of friends is a) too good at english and b) sufficiently not interested in Tomb Raider for this to not become a problem.

    2. Disc says:

      Could be just a Finnish thing, but we tend to do often the same with many foreign words that are spelled differently from how they appear to be written when speaking colloquial Finnish. I think it’s just to do with how your brain works with language. It’s very common with people who are less than fluent and/or not used to having to actually speak English.

      1. jarppi says:

        I think speaking makes the difference here. I know how to pronounce the word properly and I “hear” it correctly while thinking it but when I open my mouth it is ralli english koming out. I just haven’t spoken it enough. Finnish and English are just so different that learning takes some serious practice, especially if learning languages aren’t your strongest point. Anyway, it is not just us Finnish people doing it, just about every native language will cause similiar phenomenas.

        1. Артем of Картофель says:

          But nobody wants to spell it “Tuum Reidà¶r”.

          Incidentally, one of my hobbies is reading textspeak and similar in all languages as if it were plain Finnish.

    3. bbch says:

      Oh, man, I know EXACTLY what you mean – if I had a nickle for every time I heard someone say Tomb (pronounced as bomb) RIDER in my country, my finances would top Bruce Wayne.

      1. Tizzy says:

        Well… maybe they’re thinking of the famous scene in Dr. Strangelove? That’s a bomb rider all right…

    4. Rodyle says:

      I don’t know why, but for some reason, I read that pronunciation with an Australian accent… -_-‘

    5. Tizzy says:

      To be fair, why *wouldn’t* “tomb” rhyme with “bomb”?

      1. krellen says:

        Because English is a ridiculous language.

        1. MrGuy says:

          Because “Chasm” isn’t pronounced “Shazam”.

        2. Retsam says:

          “English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”

  4. Phrozenflame500 says:

    Dishonored or 400 days, hard one.

    400 days is really short and probably will only take one episode, while Dishonored will take ~3-5 depending on how long you take (more if you do Brigmoire Witches).

    I’d prefer Dishonored simply because I love the contrast between the DLC and the main game and I’d like your insite, and I don’t think 400 days will be all the interesting to discuss until we see season 2.

  5. Ofermod says:

    Not to nitpick, but I presume you mean “The Descent”, and not “The Decent”, that show about ordinary, reasonable things?

    As far as the next game, I vote Dishonored, simply because… Well, it lends itself far better to Reginald Cuftbert than Walking Dead, and that’s a good portion of why I watch the show.

    1. Humanoid says:

      What could possibly lend itself better to Reginald Cuftbert than Old World Blues then? :D

      1. supflidowg says:

        I second this… Also Lonesome road could be included, this should be at least 5-8 episodes while they figure out what the next major game to get the SW treatment.

    2. Tizzy says:

      I would totally play the protagonist of a game called: “The Decent”. Especially if he’s Canadian… …or a Midwesterner.

  6. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Himiko wants a body because ghosts cannot taste coffee.Havent you read the start of darkness?That the best motivator for evil dudes across the globe.

    1. Tizzy says:

      True. Don’t anyone bring me back as an undead. The world would regret it…

  7. Daemian Lucifer says:

    But dont you know that bullets would also be blown by this wind?They curve you know,as shown in that movie I forgot the name of.

    1. Thomas says:

      Bullets do actually both get blown by the wind and curve (and actually get blown by the wind causing them to curve thanks to bullet spin).

      Probably not significant over a 10 metre distance though =D

  8. Disc says:

    They’re not making Half-Life 3, but they are making Ricochet 2.

  9. GM says:

    Metro 2033 would be awesome.

    1. jarppi says:

      I’m not so sure. It is a great game but I’m not sure if it would work on SW since you can’t just walk in and break it. Last Light would work better, imho.

      But do you know what would be awesome? Errant signal – Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light.

      E: I vote for 400 days.

      1. Josh says:

        While I’d love to do Metro: Last Light, the story relies so heavily on a clear understanding of what happened in the first game that it’d be very difficult to just hop into. At the very least, you would lose a lot of the emotional impact of the Dark Ones’ plotline.

        1. jarppi says:

          Yeah, you’re right. I was just thinking what king of game mechanically would work on Spoiler Warning and out of those two the latter one would suit better. Metro 2033 is way more unforgiving and requires more sitting in the corner and wating (if you want to hear all the converstions) so I have my doubts how it would turn out in SW. I’m not saying “don’t do it” -I actually would like to hear your thoughts-, I just have my doubts. But then again, I thought The Walking Dead wouldn’t work on Spoiler Warning yet it did came out well…

        2. ET says:

          Wait…since when does SW care about emotional impact in a game, during the episodes of the show?
          I thought it was a giant peanut-gallery, ala MST3K! :O

        3. Rodyle says:

          So basically: we don’t want two thirds of Spoiler Warning’s fanbase to die of alcohol poisoning because of the phrase “in the original Metro”.

    2. AJax says:

      Strongly in favor of.

      1. McNutcase says:

        Same, due to being too much of a wuss to actually PLAY Metro 2033.

        1. PeteTimesSix says:

          Ill throw in my vote for Metro 2033 as well.

          We are voting, right? Thats how these things work on the internet, surely. Obey the masses!

          1. Really? I mean, it has nice atmosphere, but it’s a three minute story told across a fifteen hour game. It would turn into the Bioshock season, or probably a worse version of that.

            1. It had some nice setpieces, but… yeah, I’m not sure how well it’d do for Spoiler Warning.

              It may also have been just me, but when I played through, I didn’t get how to defeat the things in the walls that were scared of light. Was the solution ever stated? I had to go look at a walkthrough eventually to get what I was supposed to do.

              1. Josh says:

                Those spider/scorpion things in Last Light? Keep your light on them until their carapace burns and they flip over, then shoot their soft underbelly or just keep your light focused on them until they die.

                1. I think so. They were near the end in a place that had loads of white tile and tunnels/vents they could pop out of.

                  Did someone say “use your light on them,” or were you supposed to work that out for yourself? There’s every chance I missed the dialog or was looking the wrong way when someone demonstrated how to kill ’em.

                  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                    First time you encounter them,you are told that they hate light,and that you need to strike at their bellies.

                    Also,if you want to save ammo,once they are flipped,just come close and gut them with your knife.

  10. Halceon says:

    I vote for something that is mechanically different. I guess that means 400 days in this case.

    Although I’d love to see what you guys think about Dragon Commander.

  11. Thomas says:

    Himiko is already in mortal form. She possesses a person to user her power, but that body still wears away and gets old, so to retain the ability to walk and not crumble into dust she transferred her spirit into younger hosts. After the last of her available remaining heirs committed suicide she had no host to go to, but her body was already to old to procreate.

    So she sat on the island summoning storms in the hope that one of her distant relatives who presumably went to far off lands would be shipwrecked and someone would perform the right that transferred her to a young body capable of moving around. (Her form here is a statue surrounding her corpse, and presumably Matthias’ dragged it up her and prepared it)

  12. Tuskin says:

    What kind of KOTOR problems are you having? The Steam version runs fine on my Win7 64bit.

    1. Josh says:

      Shamus implied the problem was stability based, but the game actually runs just fine on my PC. The problem is that the game’s pre-rendered cutscenes use the bink proprietary video format, which cannot be recorded using FRAPS-style screen-capture technology.

      I have a solution to the problem, but it’s not exactly optimal: I’d have to pull the cutscenes out of the game’s movie folder and manually convert them to a viewable format and then splice them back into the episodes in editing.

      It’s a lot more work and a lot rougher than I’d like but not impossible. We’ll see if we decide it’s worth the trouble.

    2. Shamus says:

      * Fraps can’t record the cutscenes.
      * Our streaming software stops broadcasting when cutscenes begin and end.

      There are workarounds, but these snags make the process that much more frantic and error-prone. Josh has to stay on top of all these hotkeys to keep restarting the stream every time a cutscene kills it. (Preferably before a bunch of annoying “I can’t see the game!” talk interrupts the flow of the discussion.) And if Josh makes a mistake, the only way for him to know is if we tell him, since he’s playing the game and doesn’t have another way of communicating with us.

      When the stream gets restarted, very often the commenters get stuck watching a 45 second advertisement. And then when we finally see the game again, we’re all out of sync with each other and some of us see Josh’s game from 10 seconds ago and some see it from 30 seconds ago and so the chat gets all confusing. The Josh screams “OH NO WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?!?!” and we can’t see his game yet. We can’t ignore him and we also can’t comment, so all conversation grinds to a stop until we catch up and find out if this is a crash or a hilarious glitch or just a simple game over.

      Basically, stopping and restarting the stream makes a bad system a lot worse.

      If the cutscene change kills the fraps recording and we don’t notice, then we run the risk of sitting there for an hour and a half recording only to find out there are gaps in our footage and we need to re-do the whole thing.

      And then there’s the extra work that Josh would need to do to rip the BNK movies and splice them back into the show so that at least the viewers can see the cutscenes instead of 30 seconds of black screen.

      And there’s also the problem of the game being native 4:3, which was fine back in the day but now looks horrible on YouTube. There are hacks to get the game to run at 16:9, but they’re hacks and we’d have to investigate to see how they impacted stability / streaming / recording.

      Also there’s the risk that, once we’re out of things to talk about, the show will devolve into another extended BioWare bitch & moan session. And I don’t want to go through that again. Also, the game is long by today’s standards, so embarking on the series would be a long commitment.

      So it’s a lot more work for Josh and a lot more general risk of things going wrong, all so we can make an ugly video that discusses a game with narrow appeal and that all of us will be sick of before it’s halfway over.

      I think you can probably figure out who the anti-KOTOR person on the cast is. In my defense, it’s a fine game. But I’m pretty wary of covering it on the show.

      1. guy says:

        It’s possible to turn the cutscenes off, actually. I did that because they kept crashing on my computer. It doesn’t make the game incomprehensible, since most of them are just dream sequences you talk to other characters about.

        I don’t know if you’d want to do it without the cutscenes, though. And it does seem like the sort of game that would become a season of disaster, since it’s so long and fairly repetitive. Maybe covering it kind of like Half-Life 2, where you skip parts and don’t do it for a solid block of time would work.

        1. Humanoid says:

          If only they had done Mass Effect 3 without the cutscenes.

          Oh, sorry, forgot we don’t talk about that here.

      2. Tse says:

        Well, you can always get an hdmi capture card and record from there. Would work on any game (including Deus Ex 1), you can capture both sound and video and use a separate PC (if you have one) for recording and streaming, which would eliminate any performance issues.
        P.S. Would also be useful if you decided to do a SW on a console game.

      3. Thomas says:

        ‘I think you can probably figure out who the anti-KOTOR person on the cast is. In my defense, it's a fine game. But I'm pretty wary of covering it on the show.’

        I think the good and the bad things about KotoR 1 and 2 are probably not well suited for a video Let’s Play and Spoiler Warning in particular. All the interesting things are in dialogue (and text) heavy interactions which are hard to pay attention to and listen to other people talking at the same time. (And it must be harder for you guys to follow whats going on and talk about it)

        And the gameplay itself is completely solid and bland. You hit stuff, it’s not that complicated, there’s no dynamism or chance of things going wrong. For the majority of the activity in the game, there’d be nothing to say about it at all. ‘Well, we’re hitting some bounty hunters. Now we’re hitting these animal things’. Without even the crazyness of Fallout/Dishonoured or the visual interestingness of Tomb Raider.

        And I don’t know how it is for other people, but the things I dislike about KotoR 1 aren’t even very interesting nevermind any other problems. It played it very safe, was a bit vanilla and some of the characters are pretty flat and boring. There’s nothing cool to say there, maybe other people have more interesting problems with the game. The best KotoR LPs I’ve seen have been text LPs (because the game is basically reading stuff anyway)

        1. Sleepyfoo says:

          My personal KotOR Canon, and spoilerwarning-like mockery of the silly things in the game, can be found in the fic So Not My Problem wherein the protagonist never really forgot he was Revan, and wasn’t really all that interested in solving all these other peoples problems.

          Enjoy :)

        2. Tizzy says:

          Yeah, I’m not eager to see KOTOR either. Or KOTOR 2, even though I never played that one.

          What I hated the most about KOTOR was the wasted opportunity: here is a brand new setting to use, and all they could do was rip off the original trilogy, including the tie-fighter expys trying to stop you from leaving a planet.

          Too bad, because there was some really interesting material whenever they went off the rails, like the dark jedi academy that tried really hard to fairly represent the dark side’s philosophy, more than the movies ever did.

          1. Thomas says:

            I always thought there was probably an upper echelon mandate on that as part of Lucas’ hero with a million faces style vision. I’m pretty sure the people for the Forced Unleashed were told there had to a love interest, there had to be a sidekick robot, etc

            1. Fleaman says:

              I hated that we had another Yoda.

              I mean, we could have had a character LIKE Yoda. You could do “this is like Yoda in his prime”, or “this is like Yoda, but he has these strongly-held beliefs that land him in hot debates within the Jedi Council”, or even “this ancient mystical hag character is basically girl-Yoda”.

              But no. It’s just Yoda.

      4. Tuskin says:

        Ah yes, the Cutscene problems, I remember now. I understand. KOTOR is a pretty long game.

        What streaming software are you using? OBS (Open Broadcasting Software) might be good alternative, its a free and I find it pretty stable when I’m streaming. it might not do what you describe.

        Anyways if thats out of the picture, 400 days seems like it would be interesting to watch.

        1. Josh says:

          That is what we’re using actually. To be clear, we only tested it for about ten minutes and it’s not clear if this would be a repeated problem or if it was just cutting out for some other reason.

          1. Tuskin says:

            I noticed if I set OBS to also record the entire monitor it would catch the Cutscenes, but they would be shoved into the upper left corner of the window, so that wouldn’t work.

          2. RTBones says:

            I guess the real question is: is it worth testing further? What is the chance you would do a KOTOR season if you could minimize the technical difficulties? If you had a few savegames near cutscenes, you could troubleshoot to see if the problem lies in one cutscene, some, or all of them – without having to play the entire game.

            Just wondering.

      5. MichaelGC says:

        Yikes. Doing another Mass Effect 3 runthrough sounds (ever so slightly) preferable to dealing with all of that…

      6. Solution: Replace the cutscenes with Rutskarn doing a puppet show of the relevant plot points.

        1. Tizzy says:

          Hell! Just make the whole show like this. Have Ruts watch the stream and act out the scenes in real time!

          1. Now I want someone to just do a puppet show of the SW Crew’s dialog, as if they’re watching a puppet-Josh play over his shoulder.

            They don’t even have to look like their real-world counterparts. They could just be different-colored socks.

      7. Atarlost says:

        I note the lack of full voice acting (aliens speaking gibberish don’t count) wasn’t on your list of reasons. If that means you’re willing to tolerate less than full voice acting I’d love so see something like Fallout or Fallout 2.

        1. Due to low resolution, someone would have to narrate/summarize all of the unspoken dialog choices, not to mention you’d need a LOT of save-scumming and/or edits because (especially early on), the game plays like a griefing DM.

  13. Thomas says:

    That was another good season of Spoiler Warning, the shorter games really do help an awful lot (although it doesn’t quite feel like SW without open-world games). I think this was the most analytical season yet, it didn’t get at all nitpicky towards the end and you were easily 3/4’s of the way through the season before even beginning to run out of fresh insightful things to talk about.

    So, cheers! And looking forward to the next one! =D

  14. Zukhramm says:

    I don’t get the sequel set-up at all. What is that journal? I can’t remember anything about that in the game. Where did it come from? What is she looking for?

    1. Thomas says:

      I think the idea is that it was implied in the game that Lara’s father believed and worked on a lot of myth-based archaeology that Lara had refused to believe in and that now with her experiences behind her Lara is going to follow in his footsteps and check out some of the things he was working on.

      …but I didn’t get it either. Until Shamus had mentioned it as a sequel hook I hadn’t even realised it meant something. I thought it was meant to imply that she was going to be continuing adventuring some unmentioned time later and had found another journal full of mysteries, from wherever Indiana Jones and the ilk pull them from

    2. Akri says:

      It’s her father’s journal. She has it with her in the Endurance cabin at the start, and I guess she picks it up when you go back there? Even though it doesn’t show her doing that? Or it’s a magic journal. That works too.

      But yeah, it’s his journal, with clues about mysterious things he had wanted to explore. She had written it all off as just being crazy, but now she thinks he might have been right all along. And since she’s not ready to actually go home, sit down, and deal with the psychological issues that come from slaughtering hundreds of dudes and having your surrogate father get killed because of you, she’s gonna go to the place(s) the journal mentioned and investigate.

      1. Zukhramm says:

        Yeah, but why isn’t that in the game? It’s really unclear in the end scene what the book has to do with anything that happened on the island.

        1. Akri says:

          Because they screwed up. I thought I made that clear when I suggested it was a magic journal :D

      2. Trix2000 says:

        I couldn’t help but think “Wouldn’t she want to take some time to rest/recover after such a crazy ordeal?”

        Maybe she actually does, but the way things were laid out it just seemed like her thought process was “I’ve been terribly injured, killed hundreds of dudes, and will probably have to deal with PTSD… I gotta do that again!”

  15. guy says:

    To be fair to the incident with the bow, Lara was apparently planning to burn Himiko’s corpse with a fire arrow. That’s a good, traditional way of handling powerful undead. Since the ritual had already begun, shooting Mathias would have been pointless, and Lara wanted to keep Sam alive. And even if she didn’t, interrupting the ritual by killing the subject is clearly not helpful, since it’s what lead to this whole disaster in the first place.

    Now, shooting Mathias before the transfer started would probably have been better.

    Himiko apparently does not enjoy being a lich, and in fact probably can’t move in corpse form, so she wants to get back into a living human, at which point she will stop generating the massive storms and go back to being an apparently pretty sweet goddess-queen who brings peace and prosperity to- why are we trying to stop this again? Okay, so there is Sam. Maybe we could work up a ritual that does a soul-swap instead of just an overwrite, then investigate cloning an empty shell to transfer Sam into.

    Also, apparently even in her half-dead state Himiko can exert control over the storms, so why is she generating such massive ones if she wants a new vessel? Making the entire region a legendary cursed deathtrap seems counter-productive for the purposes of bringing someone to her.

    1. Ringwraith says:

      From my half-understanding it is that due to the last process being interrupted, she stuck in a sort of half-state, and this has not made her happy, so she’s sort of just conjuring up storms in howling rage for hundreds of years. Hence why the storms just cause everyone to run aground, if you go near the island, you crash there, and if you try to leave you’ll crash again, at best, because she’s not a happy bunny.
      If she got a new vessel, she can actually regain control of herself, although when you consider she was a queen who masqueraded as every single successor of hers by stealing their bodies, you can probably guess she isn’t the nicest of people to keep around.

      1. Thomas says:

        I think this is right, one of the journals (the general’s one) says

        ‘Now the first and last Queen lives a half-life, a soul in a decaying body.

        She rages in storms which will never abate while her soul is tied to this earth.’

    2. Akri says:

      I figured being trapped in a coffin for centuries has driven her stark-raving mad. It’s possible that her conjuring those storms had less to do with trying to get a new vessel, and more to do with wanting to make other people suffer the way she was suffering. Misery loves company, right? That would also explain why she kept sending lighting that fixed the path for Lara at the end–she’s not thinking “ok, this chick can’t get up here right now, so I should just leave things alone” but “I am pissed off, and I can throw lighting. You, mountain! Feel my wrath!”

    3. MichaelGC says:

      Pretty sure Shamus would want to say Sam’s body is already an “empty shell”… ;)

    4. Trix2000 says:

      I just want to know why Mathias couldn’t shove a torch in her face himself, rather than going to the trouble of this ritual.

      I mean, MAYBE he’s too crazy or something. Or MAYBE he just didn’t consider it as an option. It seems a little too unlikely to me though.

      1. guy says:

        Well, he did need to bring Sam because the Stormguard wouldn’t let him in otherwise. Since he needed to bring her in the first place, he opted to perform the ritual in the hopes that Himiko would reward him afterwards instead of going back to civilization as a dude who led a dangerous cult on a haunted island for a couple decades.

  16. krellen says:

    English has weird spelling because of its long and sordid history, which is why “new spelling” has been a thing for a couple decades now. Related: kasum.

    1. Chasm badly spelled? WTF is kasum? Google didn’t help, and now I must KNOW!

      1. krellen says:

        “Kasum” is chasm spelled phonetically.

        1. Piflik says:

          Am I the only one that likes the word ‘chasm’? I find it rather elegant…granted, I am not a native English speaker, but still…

          1. MichaelGC says:

            Nope, I like it like that. And I’d pronounce ‘kasum’ as ‘carsoom.’ (Albeit mainly just to be awkward.)

            1. ehlijen says:

              That could be because you subconsciously feel that as the word is spelled differently to the way you know it must be a different word and thus have a different pronunciation.

              I have the same thing. I can’t pronounce super and supa the same, for example, I always feel I need to overemphasise the difference.

              1. Atarlost says:

                No, the ‘u’ is definitely wrong. You don’t write unaccented schwas so if you write a vowel between s and m it looks like it should be a fully voiced vowel. Kasum looks like it should be accented on the second syllable. I can’t really express why, but I’d guess it’s that a is a weaker vowel than u.

                You really want as little between s and m as possible so the lack of written vowel is absolutely correct. You can argue that it should be spelled kasm or casm, but there’s pretty much no way it should by any stretch have a u.

          2. Josh almost pronounced it “Shazam,” which I think could be an acceptable change…

    2. What gets me about that is how Brits go on and on about the “American” spelling/pronunciation of “aluminum” rather than the “British” version, “aluminium.”

      I looked it up, and both spellings were British, from the same freaking guy, Sir Humphrey Davy:

      Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in ““ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy.

      So it was because it didn’t have a “classical ring” and was even changed twice. I guess what I’m saying is the heck with the Brits that can’t even do the research when they’re trying to poo-poo the language used by America when they started the problem in the first place.

      1. Klay F. says:

        It seems to me, not being an expert on the language whatsoever mind, that written English, as it is today, was designed to be aesthetically pleasing first and phonetically consistent dead last. As someone said up above, “chasm”, though it doesn’t make sense phonetically, has a certain air of elegance to it.

        I imagine the people who were coming up with modern English thought spelling words on a purely phonetic basis to be rather crude. Of course this doesn’t apply to words that are outright stolen from other languages.

        1. Bryan says:

          The great vowel shift didn’t help spelling either, mind you. That happened at basically the same time people decided “hmm, this “writing” thing is pretty important; we should standardize on a single way to write any given word!”; that’s why lots of words use weird-looking letters. Also why old songs tend to rhyme words that don’t rhyme at all in modern English pronunciation: they were written before the vowel shift happened.

          (I’d be very surprised if that applied to “chasm”, though.)

          1. There’s also the effect of typography where “Ye” was just “The” with a symbol used for “th” that looked like a y.

            I’d love to see an English (or whatever it’s called then) course from 2250 on a survey of proper text speech usage in formal occasions.

            1. Retsam says:

              That’s the thorn character, that’s pronounced “th” but written y. Well, the character itself is à¾, but was often replaced with a y. (I’m not why) Awkwardly if you write the name of the character with the character itself, you’re talking about the à¾orn character. (That’s probably some sort of innocence litmus test on how you first read that word.)

              Note, that this only applies to ye as in “Ye Olde Trope”, not as in “hear ye, hear ye”, which actually is pronounced just like you’d expect.

              Speaking of awkwardness induced by archaic typesetting; I was looking at some old books on display, and found one from a few hundred years ago opened to a page that contained the word “suck”, and did a major double-take.

              1. Thomas says:

                Yeah it looks way too much like ‘the born character’ right? :P

              2. If you haven’t read it, take a look at Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It’s amazing how far back words like “fart” go, and yes, it was used for a humorous scene.

                On a related note, my English prof said the nun having gapped teeth was supposed to hint that she was oversexed, with such teeth being the 14th century equivalent of large breasts.

    3. Long Range Boredom says:

      Everyone should just be glad that English dropped the long s a century and a half ago.

  17. newdarkcloud says:

    In a Spoiler Warning first, we managed to go through an ENTIRE SEASON before it ever got to the Spoiler Warning page.

    You should update that at your earliest convenience.

  18. X2Eliah says:

    So… Sam was a total jrpg damsel then? Shame.

  19. Phantos says:

    It’s true, Valve isn’t working on Half-Life 3.

    They’re making Left 4 Dead 3, though. Because everyone’s spent the last decade asking for a sequel to the worst game of the century.

    I hate Valve.

    1. Ringwraith says:

      Awww, come on now, there are far worse games that have been released in the past thirteen years
      Said voice actor later corrected himself anyway, saying how sure he doesn’t know about it, but he likely wouldn’t hear anything until they fairly far in and actually start requiring voice actors.
      I’m pretty sure it’s there in some form, but they want to be understandably quiet about it.

      1. MrGuy says:

        Also, who is this iconic voice actor who’s our bellweather for “are they making HL3,” such that “well, when HE gets the call, we’ll know it’s on?”

        As pointed out in the episode, they don’t have a problem with Gordon Freeman’s voice. Drs. Vance and Breem are dead (I presume). Alyx isn’t voiced by a “he.” Are we talking about the voice of the G-Man? Or Barry? Because there really aren’t any other choices for “characters we expect to have back with a recognizable voice actor.” And they each had, what, 5-6 lines in HL2?

        It’s not like we’re in a “Mass Effect 4 can’t possible work without Nolan North” situation here.

        1. ehlijen says:

          It’s the voice of Dog :p

          But seriously, maybe it’s Dr Kleiner? I don’t recall his voice from episode 2, but his voice was in HL1, HL2 and Episode 1.

          1. Dirigible says:

            He’s on the phone as the rocket launches, so yes, he’s in Episode 2.

        2. Ringwraith says:

          It’s too late at night (morning) for me to go and check, but there is a name, but he’s not like some minor one-liner. That’d be incredibly silly.

          1. McNutcase says:

            John Patrick Lowrie.

            He plays… approximately everyone in every Valve game. You probably know him as the Sniper in TF2, and literally EVERY nameless male in Half-Life 2 and the Episodes. And a few of the ones with names.

        3. Long Range Boredom says:

          Breen’s voice actor died several years ago so I doubt he’ll be brought back now.

  20. Astor says:

    By the power vested upon me by myself I demand Metro 2033 (and/or SpecOps). Thank you very much.

  21. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Rutskarns high school friend metaphor is like that high school friend that is holding you back when you are trying to go to college and do something with your life.

    1. Rutskarn says:

      Too lazy to log into Goldbox Hero Mode, but I wanted to chime in and say this comment made me laugh.

  22. Tim Charters says:

    I’ve commented on the general complaints about Sam in the end game before, IE that people really act like that and Sam didn’t actually know the ritual was going to kill her.* So I won’t rehash that again.

    But I honestly can’t wrap my head at all around hating Sam because the ritual made her pass out. That’s like getting angry at someone who got shot in the leg because they can’t walk without assistance. Sure, dragging them around is a real hassle, but there’s not a whole lot they can do about that. In any case, the game just cuts to Lara reaching the boat, so it’s not like you were actually inconvenienced at all by this.

    * Granted, this is because Lara didn’t bother telling Sam what was really going on during the confrontation with Matthias, but that’s a separate issue.

    Also: given how Sam was basically paralyzed during the soul transfer, I have to wonder how Hoshi managed to kill herself in the middle of it. Though I guess she could have stabbed herself just before it started and bled to death partway through, or something.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I get the hate for same.She is a normal person in this abnormal world where everyone has super powers.Lara can fall down cliffs,shrug off bullet wounds and such,so compared to her,sam is a weakling.In a world with more realistic characters,sam wouldnt come off as bad.

      1. Sleepyfoo says:

        I like the idea that the reason the ritual was taking so long was sam was actively fighting himiko, and not actually doing that bad a job at it.

        This also nicely explains the passing out afterwards in a thoroughly acceptable way.

        For the rest, a lot of propaganda/education here in the states actively encourages non-resistance/co-operation in hostage situations/muggings because you are more likely to make things worse for yourself (and the government will come get you, after all).

        It entirely possible sam internalized that message and didn’t realize it’s only remotely applicable if the government is actually aware/the hostage taker only wants a ransom or somesuch. Which is clearly not the case on the island.

        Peace :)

        1. Humanoid says:

          All Mathias wanted was to ransom Sam for 500 chicken bones.

        2. ehlijen says:

          But she’s been shown not to always be that passive. She steals a radio from a guard to call for help. That’s something at least.
          She shoots a mook in her escape from firetown. Not as many as Lara, but she does beat Lara to the gate.

          At the very least, she should be hurling insults at Witman for kidnapping her in the final act. But at that point she can’t even be upset that she was betrayed, it seems.

    2. Akri says:

      I’ve liked Sam since rescuing her from the palace. See, due to a mishap while saving the rest of the crew I managed to blow myself up, and during the death animation Reyes yelled at me to get my ass in gear. Which made me a tad angry and resentful. So when I go to save Sam and she’s all thrilled to see me, the contrast made me like her a fair bit. And then later when she tries to help fix the boat and Reyes tells her off, that made me like her more. I bonded with her over Reyes’ hatred of us.

  23. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Guys,why not do a couple of “Josh screws around in saints row 4” while waiting for the next game?

    1. TouToTheHouYo says:

      Or more “Josh screws up Scribblenauts!”

      1. Trix2000 says:

        I’d watch it, if only to laugh more.

  24. Irridium says:

    And that’s a whole season I couldn’t watch because youtube is a big butt and now only buffers videos when playing, meaning I can’t watch them now without it being a long-ass slideshow.

    *sigh*

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Try downloading it with keepvid,or some similar site.

      1. Bryan says:

        Or use HTML5. Not sure how much longer they’ll keep that working, but it buffers out until the end for now, at least.

  25. Henson says:

    I still say you guys should consider doing Dragon Age: Awakenings. It’s (relatively) short, and it’d be a nice reminder of Bioware done (relatively) well. Though I don’t know how you’d deal with brood mother boobs.

    I will admit, though, Spoiler Warning does seem to do better with games that have flexible systems. Things like Dishonoureud or Tom Braider lend themselves well to Josh’s entertaining playstyle. A active turn-based game like KOTOR or Dragon Age might not do as well.

  26. Chris the Gamer says:

    That ending sequence was kind of a letdown. At least TR: Legends and Underworld let you play with a super powered ancient artifact during the last fights.
    Although, these two wear their “every myth is true”-label more proudly, which I enjoyed more than this games last minute revelation.

  27. Lazy Buttons says:

    I vote for Dark Souls, because we all want to see Josh dying a lot, getting lost and falling off the edges.

    1. Lovecrafter says:

      Except we wouldn’t. As much as I love Dark Souls, it pretty much requires a meticulously prepared run for Let’s Playing purposes, since there’s nothing more boring than watching someone go through the same area for the 27th time. Furthermore, while we, as the audience, can be spared from most of this through the magic of editing, the hosts have no such luck and I’m willing to bet that a SW season of Dark Souls would set a new record as far as the “shortest time before the commentary goes sour” category goes.

      While, again, I love this game, I think it’s ill-suited for a Spoiler Warning season.

      1. Naota says:

        I think more likely to sour a full Let’s Play of Dark Souls is the fact that it doesn’t have a clearly-presented plot or narrative that progresses along the typical lines. You couldn’t write Dark Souls as a novel, or adapt it into a film – it’s an experience that could only be conveyed as a game and can’t easily be discussed the way Spoiler Warning favours. So in all that time where Josh is falling to his death in the Great Hollow, being murdered by Bonewheels screaming out of the darkness in the catacombs, or making friends with the bottom of Smough’s hammer, the list of things to talk about would quickly run down to almost nothing.

        Still, I think there’s potential here for a 1-4 episode miniseries. I would at least like to see the gang watch the game as it’s played and comment on that once. It’s one of the most mechanically impressive games of its sort I’ve ever seen. It actually understands minimalism, subtlety, and the consistent application of overarching rules.

        1. Klay F. says:

          Agreed, I’ve actually commented on this very thing on Twitter. The best way to present the Dark Souls experience to someone is to have the player go into it blind, but accompanied by vague direction from people who HAVE played it to explain the more obtuse aspects. This way you can have the best aspects of both a blind and a non-blind LP, and none of the disadvantages of either. The Something Awful LP of the game did it like this, and it was insanely entertaining, and the person playing it still died (on camera) over a hundred times.

        2. Lazy Buttons says:

          Yeah, I should have clarified that I _do_not_ want a full LP, because I don’t think the crew can beat the game, but a mini-series or just a few episodes of highlights and commentary would be really fun to watch. I personally would love to see someone from the SW crew who hasn’t played the game try to go through Depths / Blight Town / Catacombs blind.

  28. Eljacko says:

    I love it when Rutskarn references Homestuck.

  29. Spammy says:

    I vote for Metro 2033, because that’s my favorite of the listed games. And if you did do Spec Ops then I couldn’t watch it because I still intend to play Spec Ops and I like to go into things fresh. If you did Max Payne 3 I could watch that since I don’t care about Max Payne.

    And Metro is a pretty good game and I think you could have a lot to say about the atmosphere of it.

  30. MichaelGC says:

    I haven’t watched this episode yet, but have you considered doing Gone Home? (If anyone were thinking of objecting on the grounds they haven’t played it yet I would refer them to the title of the show.)

    It certainly won’t generate too many Reggie Cuftbert moments, but I understand it’s pretty short. I guess I’m asking for selfish reasons because it looks like the kind of game I wouldn’t play myself but would enjoy watching a YouTube runthrough of, if done by the right person or people.

    Anyway, just a thought. If not Gone Home then maybe Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2… :D

    PS I’ve just realised that the “Not Gone Home” Diecast was just this week past, not the one before. So maybe you’ll be discussing it this week, which would also be cool.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      If you want to watch gone home instead of playing it,search for a video that has no commentary.Having people talking over it will ruin the story.It can be watched as a movie,but only if you dont have someone talking over it.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        Righto, thanks for the tip.

  31. Prof_Goldfish says:

    I personally vote for either 400 days or another Hitmas of some variety

  32. Naota says:

    On the subject of the ritual, I think Rutskarn actually has a valid point about how it felt like it was taking too long even though he dismissed it as silly himself. Rituals, by name and nature, follow a clear process from start to finish, and you can generally get a sense that they’re progressing somewhere by the fact that the practitioner is doing and saying different things in a structured manner, building up to some kind of finale.

    Mathias, well… isn’t. He’s just standing off to the side screaming “Pour into this vessel!”, “Come forth!”, and presumably “Push! I can see the head!” while stuff happens. He has no method or sequence to anything – he’s just jumping up and down shouting nonsense because it makes him look more crazy.

    For comparison, the priests in Netstorm sacrificed their enemies to a pantheon of sky elements. They would chain them up to the altar and pray at one of five effigies on the ground, to a backdrop of increasingly intense gong and cymbal strikes. When the Wind, Sun, Rain, Thunder, and Storm had been placated, the poor sap would be incinerated by a lightning strike and your faction would be granted a new technology. Every stage of the ritual made sense intuitively, fit the mythology, and gave you the feeling of progress even if you knew nothing about the lore.

    Likewise, the Trickster in Thief had a set of rhyming stanzas coded by colour for each element of chaos that he would recite as you approached his altar to swap the Eye when he wasn’t looking. If you took too long (there was no real threat of this unless you were unbelievably slow or wanted to hear them all), the ritual would complete and the world would end starting with Garrett. Plenty fair as a game over state. Also way better than Tomb Raider’s.

    In essence, it’s not that Himiko’s ritual felt too slow – it’s that it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere at all, so the natural thought was “Okay, it’s been repeating itself for a minute now. Shouldn’t this thing be over by now?”

  33. Phantos says:

    I’d like to see 400 Days as an interim episode. Maybe if you need more time to decide what game should be next, you could do both that AND Knife of Dunwall?

    Or maybe some indie stuff in the meantime?

    1. Bryan says:

      Hammerwatch!

  34. Heaven Smile says:

    Since you all said that there is not enough discussions about gender on games, why not play Metroid: Other M?

    Want to set out an example to other journalists and critics that missed their opportunity back in 2010, to talk about this stuff? this is your chance now that the topic has been brought up by “Tropes Vs Women” (even if the discussing already existed but no one paid attention to it).

    It will be a nice juxtaposition with your recent Let’s Play of Tomb Raider, wont you think?

  35. Disc says:

    I’d love to see another take on the New Vegas DLC. Because there’s a lot of stuff that never got said or mentioned for whatever reason and I’ve barely seen the DLC covered at deeper length anywhere else, though since they probably haven’t been on your playing schedules for a long time, I guess I’ll just keep dreaming. This very insightful written analysis of Ulysses by Newdarkcloud just may be the only really serious attempt I’ve ever seen. And that’s a bit depressing.

    Say what you will about them quality-wise (I’ve had my own share of rage with them, yet nevertheless), playing through them and getting immersed in the individual stories and the overarching story has been one of the most personal RPG experiences I’ve had in a long time and one that I won’t forget. Planescape: Torment is the only game I could count for having more personal impact.

    On a lighter note, 400 Days sounds good to me. For the actual season, I’ll just throw some suggestions:

    Deus Ex
    Thief: The Dark Project
    S.T.A.L.K.E.R series

    Just don’t waste your time with Spec Ops. That one-trick-dog of a game is way too freaking overrated.

    1. While I’d love to see more FNV, I’d happily vote for any RPG, preferably one with FPS or other action elements. Josh gets to die, video game tropes get mentioned, and there’s a plot to be ridiculed. It’s got something for everyone.

    2. newdarkcloud says:

      So this is why that article has had a spike in traffic today. Thanks for the link! :)

  36. MrGuy says:

    I’m all for either of the suggestions as a short-term next step.

    Thinking longer term, and I’m a little surprised to be suggesting this, but have you considered Saints Row IV?

    I’m still in the middle of it, but the game is chock full of crazy ideas to pick apart. It’s The Matrix meets Mass Effect (no, really!), with other influences ranging from superhero games (I’m doing a lot of Arkham batman stuff at the moment), more than a little half-life (there’s a power that’s basically the gravity gun), and more other “hey – I’ve seen that before!” gameplay than I can recall at the moment. While still being totally over-the-top never-serious fun and a completely believable Saints Row game.

    Always loved the franchise, but this is the most ambitious “game about games” I’ve ever seen them do.

    Oh, and there’s pipe dream. Nobopdy’s perfect.

    1. Humanoid says:

      Much more suited to the hangout format than Spoiler Warning. I mean how much progress in the main plot did Josh make in the SR3 and Sleeping Dogs streams? And they were all the more fun because of it.

  37. 4:05-4:21 Best Shamus moment ever.

    7:44-8:19 THAT’S why Himiko is so upset! The light went on for me! xD
    More for the highlight reel.

    13:33 Not sure I agree with Chris here with regards to “The last bit of platforming is not as interesting.” Yeah, it’s a set path, but even in the open environments it’s technically multiple set paths for climbing (or whatever) thrown together in one area. This section is taking everything you’ve learned up to this point as it relates to platforming mechanics and having you “think on the fly” to get to your objective. They each fulfill different purposes to contribute to a whole, and I appreciate both “styles” of platforming in that sense.

    31:11 Yeah, Bungie does sign-offs like that with their games all the time. “We worked really hard on this, we hoped you liked it, thanks for playing, this wouldn’t have been possible with out you, etc.” capped off with something about world domination. I like the Bungie guys.

    And yeah, pictures in credits are a fantastic idea. We should do that more often…

    … and on that note, another season well done! I know you all enjoy doing this, but as always, thanks for taking to time and effort to share this with us. Whatever you decide to do next, I’m more than happy to watch it.

    1. MrGuy says:

      I really felt like the first 7 or so minutes of this episode may well be the best in the history of Spoiler Warning. Then they started with all that video game stuff and I kind of tuned out.

  38. MrGuy says:

    Also, I loved this Penny Arcade where they make fun of “Pandora Tomorrow” as a really random name.

    This episode of Tom Braider threw “Ziggurat Vestibule” at us as the name of a location they wanted us to take seriously.

    Oh, yeah? Well your MOM has no point!

    1. ehlijen says:

      Now if only that vestibule had been part of a funicular…

  39. Tim Charters says:

    15:55 – “Don’t move Sam, even though you could just stand up and walk away.”

    Standing up from a kneeling position with both hands tied behind your back is not something that the average person can do very quickly. Seriously, kneel on the floor, put your hands behind your back, and stand up. Notice how much harder that is when you can’t use your hands? I actually used a stopwatch to time it and for me that took about 2 seconds.

    Matthias seems to be standing about 8-10 feet away from Sam, so he’d probably be able to cover that distance and grab Sam before she could take more than a few steps. So yeah, Sam could try to escape at that point, but she wouldn’t get very far.

    Watching the last 2 episodes, I also note that Shamus’s previous criticism that Sam shouldn’t have followed Matthias because she knew that he needed her alive is also invalid. Matthias didn’t just point his spear at Sam and tell her to follow him. Every time he see him moving her around, he’s grabbing onto her arm and literally pulling her along. It’s reasonable to assume that Matthias didn’t let go until he got to the ritual altar. Which would make running away a tiny bit difficult for Sam.

    1. ehlijen says:

      The point isn’t that she couldn’t succeed, the point is that she refuses to even try, at least on screen. All Matthias has to do is hold her by the arm and she’s compliant. There’s a whole trope around women and upper arm mounted deactivation buttons, but that site is evil. Point is, that kind of weakness in a gritty story about a hero finding strength in herself is really out of place.
      If we’re to assume she tried and failed off screen…why should we? If they can’t be bothered to show us what a character is like, why should we bother guessing what they wanted us to think rather than form opinions based on what they do show us (Sam not doing much).

      All they really had to do was to make Matthias give her a dose of madeupamine/plotoform drugs and have her be actual dopey, not just passive.
      One short extra shot in a scene and a change to Sam’s expression for the last act, that’s it, no other changes to the cutscenes needed.

      That way any hate for giving up and even making lara carry her would pass on to the villain whodunnit, where it belongs, rather than stick to the supposed motivation object.

      Sam isn’t always shown as a sack of potatoes. She steals a radio form a guard and calls for help. Endgame Sam would not have tried that. In the escape from firetown, Sam briefly fights with a gun and beats Lara to the exit. Endgame Sam can’t even walk.
      That’s a change, and we need a reason to accept that change. The game doesn’t give one, so we stop seeing a character instead of a plotdevice on (non functional) legs.

      1. Tim Charters says:

        I just want to respond to one thing first:

        For the last time, Lara has to carry Sam at the end because Sam had almost gotten her soul ripped out, which in this universe causes the victim to pass out for a relatively long period of time. So in that particular case, she was kind of drugged after all.

        1. ehlijen says:

          But the juxtaposition between ‘willingly lets the bad guy walk her up the mountain’ and ‘needs to be carried down by the hero’ still is not a good end result.

          The ritual is complete fiction. The only reason it hurt Sam so bad is because the writer wanted it to. That’s fine on its own, but it then stands against the writer not wanting Sam to try to escape on the way up. So the writer either wanted us to see Sam as more helpful towards the bad guy than the hero or failed to realise that’s what the story would look like.

        2. ehlijen says:

          But the juxtaposition between ‘willingly lets the bad guy walk her up the mountain’ and ‘needs to be carried down by the hero’ still is not a good end result.

          The ritual is complete fiction. The only reason it hurt Sam so bad is because the writer wanted it to. That’s fine on its own, but it then stands against the writer not wanting Sam to try to escape on the way up. So the writer either wanted us to see Sam as more helpful towards the bad guy than the hero or failed to realise that’s what the story would look like.

    2. Frankenstein says:

      You seem to miss the point Tim. It’s not that she failed to escape its that she is entirely inert. “Oh my god he’s grabbing my arm and he can’t kill me might as well let him drag me” is not a good thought process. If she had bit into his arm and ran, even if she was caught it would make her seem like her character couldn’t have just been replaced by some mcguffin that would restore the goddess’s body. Because that is really all she is, a mcguffin that whines. Removing her lines and replacing her with a magic necklace Laura’s dad gave her that she didn’t believe actually worked would affect basically nothing. Actually I would consider it to be beneficial. And it wouldn’t be so bad if she wasn’t such a flat character when she wasn’t being kidnapped.
      Edit: of course someone sums it up better above me.

      1. Tim Charters says:

        I don’t think Sam was a good character either. But I was responding to specific criticisms that Sam knowingly walked to her death despite having several opportunities to escape. Which, as it turns out, were not true.

    3. Shamus says:

      As I’ve said before, none of this excuses a character that’s a jelly-spine with no skills and no defining characteristics other than “adores main character”. I’m just looking for SOMETHING to make us care about Sam, and having her struggle to survive would help a lot. But she’s so passive and so useless that you could replace her with an inanimate object without changing the story.

      The fact that the RITUAL made her pass out doesn’t excuse the fact that the WRITERS made her pass out, thus making her an even bigger burden. We got all the way to the end of the story and she never really did anything to help herself. (Ok, she stole that guy’s radio. Off screen. And then got it taken away again. Golf clap.)

  40. McNutcase says:

    My vote for the intermission: Euro Truck Simulator 2. Because a recent patch allowed you to turn off the speed limiter. Now, the only thing keeping your truck from going at Ludicrous Speed is physics, and we all know what Josh does to physics.

    Also, you can paint your truck in retina-searing colour combinations. Let’s give Josh free rein with a truck and the paint shop, and then let him loose on the Autobahn.

  41. Re: The removal of a USB drive or whatever.

    Wouldn’t that still let you play an MP3 file, even if it wasn’t complete? I’ve had half-finished (unknown to me) downloads of MP3s play, up until the point the data stopped.

    What I’m saying is, how do you know that souls aren’t like MP3 files? Haven’t you met people who seem like something essential to their nature got corrupted or truncated? Not to mention the screams of the undead often sound like those bleep-bloop errors in music files, so I’d say this technotheological subject is pretty well covered. I’d like my Nobel Prize now. :)

    1. Humanoid says:

      Okay, more like hitting the reset button on your computer while flashing your BIOS then.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Souls are like microsoft word files.Those wont open up if you dont copy them in their entirety.Plus some free space to let them stretch their arms,I guess.

      1. What if your high priest uses a hex editor?

    3. Alex says:

      “Wouldn't that still let you play an MP3 file, even if it wasn't complete?”

      Not necessarily. When my old computer’s first hard drive was dying, one of the things to go was the index (I forget the correct terminology). The files were still there, but if not for a third party data recovery program, they would have been inaccessible.

  42. ChoppazAndDakka says:

    Given the choice between Knife of Dunwall and 400 Days, I’d say Knife of Dunwall. I feel that while with Walking Dead we had good analysis, a lot of the fun of Spoiler Warning is watching Josh do crazy stuff and the crew reacting. Given how rigid TWD is, I feel that the gameplay of Dishonored lends itself much better to the fun tone of Spoiler Warning. In addition, many of the problems with Dishonored are fixed with Knife of Dunwall, and I’d love follow up. It got a quick mention in the Dishonored season as “better”, but I’d like to know more how you guys think so, especially from Chris, given his Errant Signal video. Hell, if you followed up with Witches of Brigmore you could probably make a full season out of it.

    As for what to do next, Metro has come up several times, and I think that doing one of the Metro games would work. Last Light was the overall better game, and I can already see complaints about the broken stealth mechanics in the original, but it’s hard to appreciate the world and plot of Last Light without playing the first (although not impossible, one of my best friends never played the first and loved the second). People keep asking about KOTOR, and personally I don’t think that would work. It feels like there’s a lot less action and more plot dialogue, of people just standing around stock still while moving their arms talking a LOT. It’s looked back on as a classic, but with that and their technical issues it’s not a good choice. I’m interested in Spec Ops, but with Chris’ Errant Signal and general discussion on the game over time, I feel that the important points of the game have already been hit. Maybe Arkham Asylum? We’d get to watch a great game while also getting to listen to Mumbles in her element.

    I really enjoyed this season, and look forward to the next. Keep it up!

  43. anaphysik says:

    “If magicians were Dragon Ball Z”…

    Chris, you make the most bizarre analogies…

    1. BeamSplashX says:

      Don’t we all wish we could be
      Part of that Dragonball Z?

      no

  44. BlooDeck says:

    Please play Knife of Dunwall! I’m being incredibly slow about finishing the Walking Dead because the zombies scare the life out of me. I literally stop after every zombie fight because of sheer utter terror. Weepers are fine though, for some reason.

  45. Jeff R. says:

    I too would like to see some Fallout New Vegas included in the DLC-fest mini-season; Old World Blues or Lonesome Road. I like the show best when you’re doing an (w)RPG, and it’s going to be a long time before there’s a SW-suitable one of those even possible. (You skipped Skyrim; Witcher 3 will probably be passed on for the same reasons Witcher 2 was, South Park doesn’t seem likely…the drought could go on until Fallout 4 hits.)

  46. hk says:

    Game worked flawlessly on my PC.

    I hope Sam doesn’t come back in the sequel. Her story should be done. But she seems to have so many fangirls for some reason.

  47. anaphysik says:

    Dammit, Rutskarn, I’m legit campaigning for Jurassic Park for a future Disclosure Alert season*! You can’t steal my idea!

    *Offer of future DA seasons not valid while Aldowyn is completely frickin lazy.

  48. SlothfulCobra says:

    Metro 2033 is a setting that I really love, but a game that I’m no good at playing, so I vote for that.

  49. BeamSplashX says:

    Lara Croft acquires a white-ish handgun and a black-ish one, and wields them akimbo, and through battling supernatural forces, she comes to terms with her deceased father.

    This was the real Devil May Cry reboot all along! Where’s my buttrock outro music?!

    Congratulations on a great season, folks. I feel like I’m talking about sports when I say that, but I’ll deal.

    1. BeamSplashX says:

      Wait, holy crap; Reuben Langdon was the stunt coordinator? He did the stunts and voice for Dante in Devil May Cry 3 and 4! WHOAAAAAAAAA

      (I mean he probably does this a lot, but let me have this.)

  50. Rick says:

    Games I recommend next?

    Sleeping Dogs

    Metro Last Night

    Assassin’s Creed III

    Bioshock 2

    Deaf Space 2

  51. TJ says:

    I vote for 400 Days as an interim, mostly because I got bored partway through the Dishonored season and stopped watching :P

    Also, any chance of a multiplayer Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragons Peak? Maybe 2 people playing (can even switch out between recording sessions) and the others commenting? Lots of great stuff to talk about there: meta-story, DM’ing tropes, the Fake Geek Guy, dealing with death, adding character to the mostly characterless PC’s from the first game, etc.

  52. Dentarthurdent says:

    >every polygon explosion originated from Lara's character model, and was usually triggered by a cutscene transition.

    And happened on Josh’s computer. Honestly, I suspect the thing is cursed.

  53. harborpirate says:

    The spoiler warning crew missed the obvious means of getting down to the beach from the temple/ziggurat thing. Sam is clearly indestructible, so Sara “Tom Braider” Croft rode Sam’s body like a toboggan all the way down.

  54. RTBones says:

    If you are looking for interim games to fill the void until the next full season, Brigmore Witches has been released for Dishonored – which means you could do Knife of Dunwall and BW back-to-back, and achieve a relatively short mid-season season, which would be well-seasoned given that you are all seasoned vets of Dishonored.

    This might be SLIGHTLY influenced by the fact that I am currently replaying Dishonored, largely to pick up some stealth achievements.

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply to Bryan Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.