Marlow Briggs EP8: Marlow Briggs and the Grotto of Animal Cruelty

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 15, 2014

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 43 comments


Link (YouTube)

Man, thanks to the devs for generous and thorough autosave. If you’re going to do checkpoint saves, this is how you do it. ON THE OTHER HAND, we wouldn’t have needed this kind of granularity in the checkpoints if the “skip cutscene” button hadn’t been one of the standard gameplay buttons.

I love how a videogame has cutscene continuity issues like a low-budget movie, as if this scene was pieced together from several different takes.

Marlow is standing nose-to-nose with Kim.

Kim: I’m the only chance you’ve got to save your little lamb, so how about you lower the harpoon?

Suddenly Marlow is holding his scythe up to her chin.

He wasn’t pointing his weapon at her until after she told him to stop doing it??? And then everyone takes turns holding the blade by the edge. And she spends the whole conversation looking him directly in the pecs. Hey lady, my eyes are up here.

It would have been awesome if just one of the characters had been given the name of an actual archaeologist known for working in this region. Then they could have opened the game with the claim, “BASED ON A TRUE STORY“.

 


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43 thoughts on “Marlow Briggs EP8: Marlow Briggs and the Grotto of Animal Cruelty

  1. TMTVL says:

    “Let’s lower the harpoon,” oh, myyyy.

    1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

      So… was that a scythe in his pocket, or was he just happy to see her?

    2. ET says:

      Glad to see I wasn’t the only person whose mind went there… ^^;

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        No, no you weren’t…

  2. SpiritBearr says:

    The game makers might have done a bit of homework for this part of the game. For the actual Maya and Aztec people the underworld was actually physically on earth at key location. There was a great amount of symbolism with water and crocodiles being related to the under world because it pretty much was just part of their belief system that was used to keep people away from dangerous places like where water was particularly deadly. So a giant maelstroms would probably be one such place.

    1. aldowyn says:

      re: the underworld being actually on earth somewhere.

      Sounds similar to the greek idea of Olympus being at, well, Olympus?

      1. Mersadeon says:

        There are loads of cultures that started out believing some conceptual cosmic place to be a real location and then gradually faded that belief out.
        Fun Fact: In English, there are two words for the concepts of “sky” (as in, literally the thing above our heads) and “heaven” (the afterlife). In German, there is only one: “Himmel”.

        1. Tizzy says:

          Basically, people overall tend tomplace their “inaccessible” places as close as hand as possible. Which means they may have to move those places when inaccessible becomes accessible.

  3. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Marlow briggs and the hordes of banshees.

    1. Jnosh says:

      Marlow Briggs and the fifty shades of black-ness?

  4. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Holy crap,this game has such fast saves.I dont remember seeing such a thing ever.Its amazing.

  5. Grudgeal says:

    Goddess of eroticism and decapitation? Were these a race of mantis-men?

    1. Clodpool says:

      The bit I picked up was Marlow’s “And you lost me.” He’s okay with drinking, and waving blades around decapitating things, but not eroticism. That doesn’t sound manly

  6. Corpital says:

    Kim’s walking animation after landing in the swampy underworld is superb. Such grace, much beauty. Wow.

    Too bad there were no skeletons to make a comparison between a normal sized person and them.

    1. Bryan says:

      *Twitch* *twitch* *twitch*

      Um. Yeah.

    2. Blake says:

      I was about to post on just that.
      For anyone interested, it’s right in the middle at about the 10:30 mark.

      Worst walk cycle ever.

  7. Ivellius says:

    Nice conversational TV Tropes-ing there.

    Also, that thing she hands you in the cutscene does look a lot like an ooze canister.

    1. ET says:

      Nah, it’s an ancient phlebotinum power-cell. Pure, uncut earth magic.

  8. McNutcase says:

    I do like that they made the boss helicopter a different model. The mookopters are Bell JetRangers, while the boss is a Blackhawk. Nice touch.

    1. C0Mmander says:

      Wait you mean there’s at least on part of this game that’s actually accurate to real life?! I need to lie down for a bit…

      And yes I know the mayan gods they used were too but I think only to an extend. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a god of erotic pleasure and decapitation(although to be fair I don’t know much about mayan gods to begin with).

      1. McNutcase says:

        Eh, both of those are common generic helicopters. It’s just that the Blackhawk is bigger. One or both will be in just about any game that involves helicopters, because they’re easy to model.

      2. krellen says:

        Not Mayan, but apparently Chhinnamasta is a thing.

      3. Kian says:

        A lot of the models have real-life counterparts. Except for the Indefenestrable II. I think, we haven’t seen it whole yet.

    2. Corpital says:

      The first thoughts while reading mookopter were a flying cow and a helicopter staffed by cows. Which, in turn, reminded me of cows with guns. I am happy.

  9. Gruhunchously says:

    I like how, in Rutskarns absence, Josh is now the Team Kid.

  10. Ithilanor says:

    I like how the one time SW reloads a previous save to catch up on missed exposition, something you folks don’t do very often…it’s for the plot of Marlow Briggs.

    The first boss in that terrible Dante’s Inferno game from a couple years back was, in fact, Death. Dante yoinked his skythe and rampaged through Hell with it.

    “I love how a videogame has cutscene continuity issues like a low-budget movie, as if this scene was pieced together from several different takes.”

    Judging by the way half the cutscenes are weird pseudo-stop-motion instead of fully animated, it almost makes me think that was the case, like they could only spend a certain amount of time/effort rendering things.

    1. Are those cutscenes in-game or video? (Josh, would you mind peeking into the game folder(s) and see if you see several large video files or bink files or similar?)

      1. Josh says:

        They seemed like in-engine to me.

  11. brashieel says:

    I have to admit this is the most fun I’ve had watching Spoiler Warning in a long while. Clearly the show needs to do more ridiculous high energy games.

    1. Isaac says:

      Metal Gear Rising:Revengeance

      1. Nordicus says:

        Oh wow, no, please no, that’s probably the worst game for this channel

        Revengeance is *amazing*, but that game will not play nice with Josh’s button mashing, and Shamus already seemingly has trouble going along with the explicit tongue-in-cheek, “rule of cool” Marlow Briggs, so a game that’s a bit subtler about it, might get an even more inappropriate reaction.

    2. Tizzy says:

      The Skyrim season offered a few really big laughs, but this one is simply constant entertainment.

      1. brashieel says:

        Yeah, Skyrim season had some great moments, but the bland sameness of vanilla Skyrim seemed to ultimately swallow the show itself. It got fairly predictable and repetitive.

        Marlow Briggs’ endless stream of madness has been a lot more entertaining. Every time they start to wear out a topic, it throws another nonsense idea out there… and then explodes again.

  12. Chamomile says:

    I went ahead and looked up a walkthrough just to get a rough idea of how much is left in this game. It turns out the game is basically formatted like this:

    Fire
    Earth
    Water
    Air

    Long ago, the four elements lived in harmony, but then everything changed when the Indefenestrible attacked…

    1. DIN aDN says:

      Balance between the elements went right out the window.

      1. lucky7 says:

        Unlike SOME things I could mention.

    2. Tizzy says:

      Makes sense: it matches the powers that MB is progressively acquiring. So we’re more than halfwaybthrough, I would imagine…

    3. The Rocketeer says:

      So the final boss is Long becoming Chaos?

      1. Bryan says:

        …Only to be defeated by four white mages. Because obviously.

  13. Torsten says:

    I think we found a god Reginald Cufthbert worships. Acan, the god of wine and musical belching sounds like the kind of deity he would follow.

  14. Haven’t read the posts yet for a good majority of these. Has anyone yet pointed out how hilarious HUGE and un-articulated Marlow’s hands are?

  15. Wow, her shoulders. It looks like someone said “hey, we can’t see her sexy hip sway when she’s in the water, let’s make sure her shoulders do the same thing.” It makes my shoulders ache just to watch it.

    1. Blake says:

      She’s just practicing her popping and locking dance moves whilst wading through a sacred swamp.

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