IDDQDerp

[Garwulf]

Game suggestion: The Magic Circle. Just saw it on a Jimquisition video, and it looks right up Alex's alley...

[AdmiralMemo]

So, I really want to go back in time and strangle Chat... I'm watching the replay of Ether One... Alex gets to the puzzle he gets stuck on, and fumbles around for 10 minutes. In that 10 minutes, Chat mentions about 8 times what the solution is. Alex completely misses all of this somehow, even after he explicitly asks for a walk-through. It's only after Alex goes on break that someone gets the bright idea to highlight the message for Alex, but by that point, Alex was just super-done with the game. Had someone simply pointed it out clearer earlier, maybe he would've gotten a bit further in the game and not been stuck on the same puzzle for 10 minutes, complaining about it. I wanted to kind of yell at Alex for completely missing the repeated messages on how to solve the puzzle, but I can't. I know how it can be, streaming, and you just miss stuff in Chat, even stuff that's repeated multiple times. Chat needs to help out when it's explicitly called for.

[Master Gunner]

Chat is also frequently told not to use the highlight other than to point out technical issues. Alex himself has said that he'll explicitly ignore anyone highlighting him/using caps to give advice.

Yes, when help is explicitly asked for, it's different, but when you've trained chat to act a certain way, it's hard to flip it.

[AdmiralMemo]

I know, I know, I'm just grousing that something could've been so simply alleviated and it wasn't.

[phlip]

To be fair, we didn't miss much, Ether One doesn't get any better. I tried it. Even if Alex had gotten through that one puzzle, he probably would have just gotten stuck on another one, and it would've been a miserable experience for all.

Long, uninteresting story - Click to Expand

I thought Alex played Ether One for a lot longer due to a misfiling of my stream downloads... he starts playing it halfway though one stream, and then I thought there was a second stream of it, so I thought he played it a fair bit. Turns out that "second stream" was actually the I, Horner stream immediately following IDDQDerp that day, where Ian had forgotten to change the stream title before going live, so the archive still said "Ether One".

Anyways, after watching the first, like, 20 seconds of the game on-stream, I decided it looked like the sort of game that I'd want to play through and experience myself before I watched the stream. After watching Verde Station I've been a bit more vigilant about that sort of thing... I wish I'd played that game myself before I watched it onstream. So anyways, I downloaded Ether One and played through the first couple levels, and... well... there's one or two moments that I thought were interesting, and was kinda curious to see Alex's reaction, but the rest is mostly all straight-up adventure-game puzzles, rub-the-items-on-the-surfaces-to-see-what-happens stuff. There were quite a few places where my immediate reaction was "I'm very surprised Alex continued playing after that" (and then when I actually watched the stream, I was completely unsurprised that he didn't).

Now, I like adventure games, puzzle games... games where the plot is mostly there as a convenience to drag you from one environmental puzzle to the next. I still found Ether One to be... pretty bland and unexciting. I got two levels in, and then gave up. For someone as vocally anti-stupid-gameplay-puzzles as Alex, I'm sure it would be excruciating.

Personally I got stuck on the same puzzle as Alex did, for a good 5-10 minutes, and only got out of it by meta-gaming "I have this item that the game made a big deal about when I picked up, and these environmental things that seem important but I haven't found a use for" and rubbed the things against the things until I found out you can smash the bottle in the crusher. There's environmental clues for the other puzzles (like using the bottle-shards to cut the hoses), but you have to read all the notes, repeatedly to make sure you didn't miss anything (I noticed that by the end of his run, Alex was running around clicking on everything except the note that had the clue for what he needed to do next).

I'm thoroughly unsurprised that that game has something like 60% completion of the "started the game" trophy, but only like 0.1% completion of the "beat the game" trophy (numbers from memory, probably slightly exaggerated).

[Dedwrekka]

On the Mad Max timeline mentioned on stream. The movies don't reflect the time passing between the release of each movie, or even the date when the movies were released. The first two Mad Max films are set around the mid to late 90s, according to an interview with George Miller where he specified that they were supposed to take place some 15 years after 1984, and Thunderdome is set 15-18 years after the second movie.

The first movie is set before the apocalypse when society is merely a lawless dystopia, and the second movie establishes that the apocalypse happens between the two movies (It happened on a wednesday, btw). Beyond Thunderdome is set roughly around the twenty-teens. In the first movie Max is in his early 20s and by Beyond Thunderdome he's around 45.

It isn't too difficult to believe that there'd still be someone around after this time, as Immortan Joe was a career military man before the war when he was Colonel Joe Moore. It seems like the time between everything should be a lot longer because there was an extensive period of dystopian social collapse, global warfare, famine, climate change, and plague before any of the movies start. The first movie is set at the really ragged end of civilization and by the time Max decides to ride off and turn his back on civilization at the end of the movie, it's all but gone already.

[GDwarf]

So, I know Alex hates being pestered to play games, but hopefully one-off suggestions here aren't too annoying.

Standard caveat that I've no idea if any of these titles would be even remotely fun to stream, nor can I, not being Alex, know if he'd actually like them. This is just a list of games that struck me as ones he might be interested in:

Reccetear: Alex has mentioned a few times that he finds the idea of playing an RPG shopkeeper to be an interesting idea, and that's what this game is all about. You play a young (14? I think?) girl whose father has run off, leaving her with a massive debt. The fairy repo agent sent to collect on the debt decides to help Reccette, the girl, pay off her loan by opening an item shop.

The game sports an excellent translation, which is a delight to read, with a very nice sense of humour. The entire game makes fun of RPG tropes and characters (the first hero you meet is perpetually poor, with no sense of responsibility, despite being good-natured). It features dungeon crawls, which are optional, but provide a nice vacation from running an item shop, should you so wish.


Long Live the Queen: A game that has a basic concept I think Alex would like, but I also don't know that it'd work well on stream at all. This is a title heavily inspired by the Princess Maker titles, without the creep factor. You play as a princess whose mother, the queen, has just died. Your goal is to survive until your coronation in one year's time. You will fail. Repeatedly. You play by choosing what skills to work on improving every week, as well as who to talk to during your free time. Your choices will change what events happen to you, which in turn will alter your mood, which alters how quickly you learn certain skills, and 'round it goes. If you've studied the right skills you'll survive and thrive, but if you've chosen poorly (which will happen) then you will die in increasingly improbable ways, as everyone in the country seems to want the throne for themselves.

Life is Strange: Remember Me was a game with interesting ideas but, I feel, rather flawed execution. The studio behind it, however, has come back swinging with this title. You play a high school photography student who discovers she can rewind time, and sets out to unravel a mystery about a missing student using this power. The title is big on branching story paths based on your decisions and actions, and apparently handles the writing very well (I've not played this one, just seen reviews, but it sounds very good).

Crypt of the Necrodancer: Another one I don't know would be good for streaming, as it requires concentration, but this game is really fun. It successfully combines roguelikes with rhythm games to make a really fun title.

Sunless Sea: A roguelike exploration/trading game, set in the Fallen London universe. You play a ship's captain trying to make a living on the underground sea that fallen London borders. Huge on atmosphere and setting, with gameplay that's not amazing, but which serves as a fine vehicle for the, somewhat overwrought, descriptions and dialogue. Very text-heavy, with grinding, so, again, possibly not great for streaming.

Grow Home: A short, but fun, platformer. It started as a tech demo for in-game animation, apparently, but got expanded into a fun adventure. You play an adorable little robot that is trying to grow a giant beanstalk to return to your spaceship. The climbing mechanics work very well, and the robot's animation is *excellent*.

Roundabout: An action-puzzle game, in which you play a chauffer who insists on driving such that her car is *always* rotating. Your goal is to ferry people around despite this unorthodox driving style. The game is fun, and the FMV cutscenes are legitimately hilarious.

Reus: A puzzle game in which you play a planet, ordering your giant spirits to terraform your surface and so allow the humans living there to thrive. It's essentially a god game, where the trick comes from keeping the different tribes of people from killing each other, and from the truly ludicrous number of ways powers combine to produce new effects.

Half-Minute Hero: Puzzle games (there are two in the series) wherein you must save the world in 30 seconds. Unfortunately, you're only a level 1 hero. The good news is that the goddess of time doesn't want the world to end, so so long as you can afford to pay her enough she'll rewind time for everyone but you, allowing you to level up and gain better gear so that you can best whatever misguided demon, monster, or wizard is trying to end the world this time.

The Swapper: A Metroidvania puzzle game, where you create clones of yourself to solve puzzles. Excellent atmosphere and puzzle design.

VVVVVV: A fun puzzle-platformer Metroidvania with only three buttons: Left, right, and invert gravity. Hugely fun, but very difficult.


So yeah, I'm not expecting any of these games to end up on stream, never mind all of them. This is just a list of titles that seemed like things Alex might be interested in. If not then not, if so then great. :B

[SAJewers]

Throwing this out there, but after learning that Distorted Travesty 3 Is coming in October, I realized that the entire series is be something Alex might be in to: http://distortedtravesty.blogspot.ca/

DT1 Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAZuJjlu0K0

[Kortanios]

Looks like you beat me to the suggestion I was going to make, GDwarf.

I was going to suggest "Life Is Strange" as well but for a different reason. The design of the game is fantastic. There is a lot of indirect storytelling, characterisation through the environment, objects, small observations etc. They do an excellent job at foreshadowing and placing small clues in the world about what is actually going on. Also, there is good writing, a female main character who is distinctly a girl and it is handled like that is the most normal thing in the world with none of the usual female game character tropes... and there is just that tiny bit of emotional gut punches... several of them...

[Antitonic]

There's "Beyond Eyes" wherein you play a young blind girl looking for her pet cat, and you have to navigate by the character's other senses and memory. It looks like a watercolour painting.

[mtvcdm]

Adam played something on his home stream last night called Rock of Ages.

It is the silliest, most wonderful thing, and Alex would have a blast with it.

[AdmiralMemo]

I like the game, but it won't run well on my own PC. I'd like to see how it's actually supposed to play.

[AdmiralMemo]

People will probably be pestering Alex to play "The Beginner's Guide" on-stream. While I highly recommend Alex play it, I recommend it play it on his own. It's an experience that I don't think having Chat will help with.

[Lycodrake]

I've recently been marathon-ing the Dark Souls content and really liked it.
Thank you Alex for making a game I had heard horror stories about an enjoyable experience to watch and hear commentary on!
A friend picked up the game before I was aware of LRR and gave up, but I might just send him to Yahtzee's review/guide-thing.

[vargsarath]

Okay time to head out before the firing squad: Alex, Please for the love of Kos do a Bloodborne/darksouls comparison vorthos run i beg of you.
I get that you do not want to do this before 1 people stop asking you and 2
until you have the nessescary experience and insight to present it properly
but it's been out for a long while and it'd be greatly appreciated especially considering what a personal experience that game is, so yeah that's my 2 cents before it's innevetably drowned out in Dark Souls 3/DOOM requests.

[HeyZootie]

Question for Alex about the settings you changed to make Stalker:CS stop crashing so much? I don't think it crashed at all this last stream, and that's my biggest problems with playing any Stalker game.

Thanks for any help!