“How’s the AIR, douchebag?”
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
What a horrible cutscene. Script, voiceover, content, nothing feels right. Usually I blame the translation (“It’s nothing, really.” works in Japanese, but not in English), but in this case, even the orginal must have been majorly fucked up.
Great unskippable. :)
I did like the part where the girl says “I’m the one with the gun.” Until she spoiled it by opening her mouth again.
JRPGs seem to be pretty bad at this opening cutscene stuff. The main problem with this one was how unthreatening and lackadaisical it all was. Everything is all quaint and picturesque, with windmills and rolling meadows and a gently comedic misunderstanding about fish sketching, and then BAM! Cyberpunk soldiers from nowhere killing civilians! And even then it fails at building a sense of urgency or credible threat, especially when an imperial scouting force is taken down by an art student with a bolt-action rifle.
It looks like a Miyazaki anime to me, or an attempt to copy his style.
It reminded me of Eternal Sonata, in both appearance and rambling opening cut scene.
If you guys haven’t played this game yet, you should, its actually really a lot of fun. Yes the cut scenes are kind of goofy and emo, but that seems typical to me of this genre. By the end of the game, I actually cared about the characters, which I guess means I’m less cold hearted than Yahtzee …. hey, my life is complete now!
Zcline’s right, the game is HORRIFYINGLY fun, but the cut scenes and voice acting are borderline criminal. The story’s decent… sorta, but it’s really the gameplay itself that I suggest, which seems to be the biggest thing that people don’t mention when they talk about the game.
I feel like I’m in the minority here, but I just don’t find these guys funny. I’m not trying to insult anyone here. Just expressing my opinion.
If you think the cutscenes are bad, go and watch the anime. The first episode essentially remixes and lengthens this scene, and somehow manages to make it 10x worse.
@Sam – They’re a bit hit or miss for me, some stuff is really funny, and some not at all. I really liked the line Shamus quoted.
I was a big fan of MST3K, and even that was sometimes hit or miss. I think it’s fairly dependent on how mockable the material is. But the Unskippable guys are a bit more handicapped in that they only have a few minutes to work in, so it’s a lot harder to build up running jokes.
Amstrad, I’m going to disagree with you. The scene in question is unquestionably better in the anime. Though the voiceovers for the fish here is classic.
“No punsies”? I liked the puns in the last one :D
@Sam and LintMan: Agreed. There are about half a dozen Unskippables I absolutely love, but the rest are pretty meh. I think they do running gags really well, though. They just spread them across multiple episodes.
“…And that was the fourth time I died.”
Hmm, is only my Firefox cocking up over the Escapist videos lately? All I see is a grey-to-black gradient flash window, but nothing shows up. I’ve been having to jump over to Chrome this last week to watch anything from there :(
@Nyaz
Same here, only I’ve been using IE Tab. After investigating deeper, disabling Adblock Plus seems to have fixed the problem. If that’s an intentional move by The Escapist, it’s a very clever one.
Well, guess Unskippable just lost a viewer. I was looking forward to them lampooning this game, too.
Every time my wife walks in when I play this game I have to explain that (yet again) there is actual gameplay, just not in this cutscene. There is a lot of dialogue. Almost a painful amount.
@Mark
I haven’t had any troubles with adblock on, but I also manually allow them through noscript whenever I visit. Dunno what that would do.
For the videos linked here, if you’re using Adblock Plus you can just set it to be disabled on shamusyoung.com from the dropdown menu of the adblock icon. There are all of 2 banner ads here, and they’re both just links to the Experienced Points articles, so it won’t do any harm to disable it on this domain.