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Zoo Race was the best W+P ever. I'm re-cracking up at the gifs now. My favorite (besides "Race me Hannah!") was the first Supercat launch, when it just opened its mouth in midair and went "raarr raar raaaarr".

So..unbelievably...bad...can't..stop..laughing..help me please help me...

Wow. We might want to see about getting a kickstarter for these guys so they can make more of these games.

On another note, did anyone else find sheer hardcore factor of YouTestament to be somewhat awesome? Getting straight-up "Give Us Barabbas"'d right off, getting your hand cut off as punishment, and dying in the street in the first 5 minutes of gameplay? And people think Eve Online or Dark Souls is hardcore lol.

And then there's the feature set. You gotta admit, it's pretty sweet compared to what you get out of Triple A games these days. The sheer number of things you can do and have happen to you as a regular mook was impressive. Then they added on Hindu magic powers, so big bonus there lol.

Then Jesus started saying things like "not from this world" and "the force is strong with you". At that point, I wanted to see this game put you on a path that eventually led you to discover the pyramid aliens who are behind all of the religions of the world. That would just complete the experience for me.

What is the email address to submit new games for this again? Can't seem to find it listed anywhere.

So, the wife and I watched about 2 hours of the Watch + Play for Revelations 2012...and holy crap...that game was uncomfortably racist.

Every now and then you get a game with unfortunate implications, but usually those sink in after you've finished watching, as part of a "Hey, wait a moment..." reaction. I don't think I've ever had one basically reach out of the screen and hit me over the head with a hammer up-front like this before.

For those who haven't seen it (and I am not making it up) four white people (one of whom is an aerobics instructor) are chosen as the saviors of the world, and sent back in time to prevent the Mayan Apocalypse. They do this by going around Mayan temples, killing hundreds, if not thousands, of Mayan warriors, and eating the hearts of those they have killed. Occasionally, prior to killing more Mayans, a gigantic Mayan priest spouts off something about Mayan culture (as though that's supposed to make the apparent genocide of the Mayan civilization...better?).

I'm sorry, but I've got to ask - was the developer behind this game an unrepentant white supremacist, or just completely tone deaf to the implications of four white people saving the world from a supposed apocalypse by mowing down hordes of brown people?

More likely than not, the creator was just tone-deaf. Usually games whose intended purpose is propaganda are more painfully obvious. Often they'll insist on using slurs in the case of White Supremacists or in the case of games like YouTestament, they'll spend as much time as they can quoting scripture at you.

Of course, that's just a guess, and I guess I'm just an optimist.

Unintentional racism is still racism, and yes, that game was quite racist. Not white supremacist racist, but Robinson Crusoe racist.


Unavoidable reference: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=286

Well, at least unintentional racism (or any other unintentional prejudice) can be possibly cured via education and learning. Malicious prejudice, however, cannot be, and must be tackled differently.

Oh, it's still racist, just not intentionally racist.

Were they sent back in time? I think maybe they were sent to an alternate dimension, or something? It doesn't really matter, the game is still awful, I'm just highlighting how utterly incomprehensible the plot was, too.

You know I'm pretty disappointed over this whole Penumbra thing.

I'm not surprised that Alex hates it, given his automatic hatred towards anything even remotely resembling puzzles, even though the ones in Penumbra are generally fairly intuitive(if somewhat contrived) as long as you pay even the slightest bit of attention. The burning plastic to trigger the sprinklers for example seemed perfectly logical and intuitive to me.

I'm just curious why this doesn't get the same indie leeway that was afforded to other terrible games, like Doorways or that absolutely dreadful piece of garbage Dreadout. I think Penumbra actually had a comparable budget to Dreadout, and is in fact made by a tiny team. Frictional Games only became like a real company when they made Amnesia.

The game has some faults but having puzzles is not one of them. It's a game primarily designed around solving puzzles. It's entirely OK to not like that, but faulting it for it is kind of like faulting an FPS for asking you to shoot things.

The game was also designed around using physics (bear in mind it's like 7 years old). Back then physics in games were still a new thing and the tech used in it is actually fairly impressive. Generally the idea is being immersive through reading all the stuff you pick up and through the direct "physical" interaction with the environment. I would assume all of that is lost when you're in full meh mode and have a few hundred people yell various things at you.

Try playing any horror game in a brightly lit room with 10 of your friends and see if it's in any way scary.

It's also not about a zombie virus made by ZombieCo. The research base was there to try and find something called Tuurngait which is some kind of spirit in Inuit mythology (the real one, not just the game). They managed to find it eventually only to discover that it manifested as a sentient virus (in the protagonist's case, Clarence, who in case you didn't catch it, is a reference to the angel in It's a Wonderful Life). Later on you manage to actually get rid of Clarence, some more weird crap happens and eventually you manage to communicate with Turrngait who basically just wants to be left alone and only killed the scientists in self defense, and then basically lets you decide its fate. There's a bit more to it, but that's the basic gist of the plot.

It's far from a perfect game, but it's one of the better horror games in general and it really makes me sad when you make fun of it for entirely the wrong reasons.

I think Alex asks a lot of the horror genre by wanting a game where the core engagement isn't through puzzles. Once you eliminate games with a puzzle focus (Penumbra, Silent Hill), and games with an action focus (which is rarely effective horror; see Resident Evil 5), what are you left with? There's evading monsters like in Outlast, but I think after the fourth time Rumplewiltskin showed up most people (other than Kathleen) weren't so much scared by him as annoyed (Of course, then the Walrider showed up. Maybe that's the trick).

Even Alex's idea for a horror game, where you have to communicate with the ghosts and sort out their ghost baggage, is really a puzzle game. I'm going to think a bit on this. Surely there are some forms of core engagements that haven't been tried yet.

I don't know that it's puzzles, per se, that are the problem so much as it's bad puzzles.

Yeah. Alex isn't annoyed at regular puzzles. Alex is annoyed at the so-called "Soup Cans" puzzles and the "Moon Logic" puzzles.

Part of this would also be Alex is playing the game with us, trying to pay attention to the chat, and generally be entertaining. Trying to sit there and figure out puzzles is not great streaming.

Yeah, it's worth noting that playing a game while doing a running commentary is much harder than it seems, and gets even worse when you interact with a chat. Puzzles, in that environment, can become nigh-impossible to solve properly because your already-not-actually-capable-of-multitasking brain is trying to do five things at once.

My issue is, in a game like Penumbra, and after seeing how he played Penumbra, I fear the same thing for Amnesia, you need to be able to get absorbed. Going, "Yadada, dicking around with physics objects, oh sheet of paper, gonna just ignore this, oh, an enemy, I guess I'll just walk away from it." and then sit there and complain about how puzzles that are actually fairly intuitive aren't intuitive just to get players to rise against the game in chat, which simply leads to "!game bad" groupthink, with no one actually considering the game for it's merits.

Sure, there are a few puzzles that are mundane and poorly thought out, but for instance, the room where he had to make it look like the picture? Sure, it wasn't scary, but I don't see how it's hard to realize that that's what you needed to do, since the game says that the room isn't quite how you remember it. Fire under a sprinkler? That one was obvious, and if he had been screwing around with the physics objects and actually played the game, I doubt it would've been a problem.

Fun fact about every horror game ever: You can run away from the enemy.

If this is blowing your mind, I apologize, but in every single game where you have no way to kill the enemy, you can escape it, because if you can't, the game becomes insta-gib trial and error, which stops being scary very quickly.

The only game that tries to buck this trend is SCP Containment Breach, which still allows you to escape, but requires that you do so in a very specific way, and I'd like the concept more if the mechanic supporting it wasn't so horrendously feel bad. Run into 173 just as you just about need to blink? Sorry, you're SOL.

I'm just saying, I could dick around with physics object and shit talk Half-Life 2's fire graphics to people who've never played it before and convince them it's shit if I tried, and that's basically what Alex was doing, because he didn't even attempt to play the game legitimately.

Well as we still don't have a Let's Nope thread, and for some reason this was missing...

I don't think it works as well without the song, but..


Also comes in textless flavor.

Okay, so without a Let's Nope thread, I'm putting Graham & Alex's idea for a "Horror Game Bingo Card", with things like "You have to turn the power back on", "breakable wooden crates in a sci-fi environment" and similar...

will add more info once I've found some things like online bingocard generators...


ADDENDUM: like this: literary BCG

and here's a more general generator

okay, per alex's directive, I'm adding "Close the Valve" to the list

I have no particular desire to use this as my avatar, but for anyone that does:

Not sure if anyone brought it up in the chat latter, but the elite nooks with guns and wings were allusions to Hussar's, the (among other groups) Police light calvary that strapped wooden wings to themselves before engaging in combat.

So I was watching The Zoo Race episode again (which I believe is still not up on Youtube). And I decided to see where the intro was. Because frankly, I'm not sure if that's real. I really, really hope it is. But I just can't believe it.

Then... I found This. As a note, this links to godtube, as I couldn't find a youtube version. It's the other intro to the game. Enjoy.

Why... WHY does the developer think that long camera pans of someone walking are a good thing to use ever. I swear, it's what 50% of all of the cinematics in the game are. The other 50% of them all is a mix of bad dialogue and dancing.

I suspect it's a "I did it! I figured out how to make a thing walk! Everyone look!" kind of deal. The game is such a hodge-podge I'm 99.9% certain no professional programmer got within a mile of it.