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 What Is It? - Dreamworks teamed up with Steven Spielberg to present a simulation game where you get to "direct" "your" "very" "own" "movie." To its credit, it seems to do a very neat job of breaking down all the aspects of filming a studio project, including featuring people that actually work in Hollywood to assist you. You get to flesh out a treatment into a full script, manage budget and schedule, set up master shots, and even edit and add Foley. But all that attention to detail doesn't necessarily make for a fun game. It's interesting to a degree, but the real treasure here is the end result; a cheesy movie that stars Quentin Tarantino and Jennifer Aniston. So after messing around for a bit, we jump on over to Director's Choices, which takes all the movie scenes from the game and organizes them into a stand-alone FMV game. Feel free to play it for yourself!
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Dec 21, 2023 20:46
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| # ? May 6, 2024 00:19 |
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 Merry Christmas, everyone. Since Night Trap is a game that doesn't really let you experience its story AND play the game at the same time, we decided to watch a video that puts all the scenes together in a comprehensive movie. If you just wanna watch it without us gabbing over it the whole time, the original video is here.
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Dec 25, 2023 20:42
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That was fun shlocky horror. Those SCAT guys weren't great at their jobs, though; it's kinda dumb that the player character can get fired for incompetence on the spot when everyone else's spatial awareness is so bad they can just be ambushed out of the picture.
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Dec 27, 2023 08:00
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The Spielberg game (original version) probably throws all those complications at you to make the game interesting, but it comes off feeling like Spielberg trying to get you annoyed at the people he has to work with. What really wasn't clear is how you're supposed to decide on those options. Do you save money if you cancel the rest of the day since you don't have to pay people for it? Or does it cost more when you 'lose' that day of production? It also might give an odd view of film production. "Why is X film $20 million over-budget? Must be the hairdresser's fault!"
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Dec 28, 2023 17:59
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:That was fun shlocky horror. Those SCAT guys weren't great at their jobs, though; it's kinda dumb that the player character can get fired for incompetence on the spot when everyone else's spatial awareness is so bad they can just be ambushed out of the picture. We can pick apart all the weird things about Night Trap, but I don't think any of us will live long enough to finish that list. It's definitely a product of its time, where you didn't have to think about writing good dialogue, or a consistent, coherent plot, and you didn't have to worry about having good acting or good effects. And if you think THIS is a wild ride, wait until tomorrow... Kangra posted:The Spielberg game (original version) probably throws all those complications at you to make the game interesting, but it comes off feeling like Spielberg trying to get you annoyed at the people he has to work with. It wasn't clear to me either, but to be fair, we didn't spend too long with the game. My best guess was that you have to find a balance between how you utilize your schedule against how you use your budget. So you could maybe take the time to wait for hair and costuming and so on and so forth, but you're burning money. If you close up shop for the day because of setbacks, you're wasting time. You probably need to learn which options are best for which situations. Or you can just play an altered game on a communist website that lets you play through all the film scenes by themselves.
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Dec 30, 2023 23:03
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 What Is It? - American Hero was originally in development for the Atari Jaguar's CD add-on, but Atari ended up collapsing before the game could be completed and released. Prototypes of the unfinished game would end up floating around for years, but then in 2021, Ziggurat Interactive picked up the game and packaged it as a cross between a preservation effort and a remaster. Retired agent Jack Devon spends his days drinking carrot juice and looking at boobies, until the military tracks him down and brings him in for One Last Job. Krueger, his old nemesis, is back, and Laura, Jack's old girlfriend, has been kidnapped. Pulled back into action, Jack must investigate Laura's disappearance and put a stop to whatever evil scheme Krueger is planning. Or... not. After all, what happens depends on the choices you make, and the choices here are loving wild. Thankfully, the video here barely scratches the surface of the places this game can take you (hint: Jack fucks. A lot.), so you can go pick up your own copy and explore everything American Hero has to offer!
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Dec 31, 2023 20:25
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Happy New Year, everyone. We're now gonna be on a sort-of hiatus, because Calli had her baby and needs to get settled in with all of that before we resume recordings. I don't know how long that will be, but I've got at least 3 solo videos I'll be putting up as the next updates for the thread before we go back to group stuff. I've also got a few videos of Michael and I playing another We Were Here game, and we might do another co-op LP soon as well. And then Michael, Matt, and I might stream some more of the Trine games. So we've got things to do for a while. But for this thread, now is a really good time to offer your thoughts on how things have gone so far. Thoughts on the games, or the videos, or what you'd like to see moving forward. One thing I'm planning to do, is for us to delve into some longer games, once we're in a position to dedicate the time and focus to them. Maybe even some more puzzle-centric adventure games where we work together to solve them.
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Jan 1, 2024 22:22
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Congrats, see you in a decade or so.
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Jan 2, 2024 01:08
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I have faith you'll return sooner than that and I love the sound of y'all working through adventure games as a group. Don't have much in the way of suggestions but I think your plan for upcoming videos sounds good.
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Jan 2, 2024 02:14
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Something that I realized about American Hero is that you're clearly meant to go for some of the bad choices, and then replay it, to see where it all ends up. You get information from the bad ends that can help explain what's going on in the main route*. That's not unusual for a lot of adventure games, but it is kind of an innovation for FMV choice games. The narrative of the game is not merely the narrative of the movie. So if you somehow managed to get perfect choices the first run-through, which is certainly possible, you wouldn't get the full experience and likely it wouldn't make for an interesting movie. Granted, the game could've done a better job with pacing and checkpoints than it did, but I do appreciate the attempt to treat it as a game instead of just a movie with scene choices. *We didn't see it for a couple of obvious reasons, but the many choices to go with Crystal at the start are one example; the game is urging you to investigate the bad ends that can result, and those reveal plot information in a way that makes sense later in the game. Also, Musetta Vander's best role is as a supervillain in Scanners 3, which is nothing like the original but is a real hoot.
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Jan 3, 2024 07:18
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Kangra posted:Something that I realized about American Hero is that you're clearly meant to go for some of the bad choices, and then replay it, to see where it all ends up. You get information from the bad ends that can help explain what's going on in the main route*. That's not unusual for a lot of adventure games, but it is kind of an innovation for FMV choice games. The narrative of the game is not merely the narrative of the movie. So if you somehow managed to get perfect choices the first run-through, which is certainly possible, you wouldn't get the full experience and likely it wouldn't make for an interesting movie. Granted, the game could've done a better job with pacing and checkpoints than it did, but I do appreciate the attempt to treat it as a game instead of just a movie with scene choices. Which is all good and fine and I don't mind that for this kind of game, but the experience was really hindered by not allowing players to skip through scenes. I could understand that if the game had been released for the Jaguar CD back in the day, but it was a major oversight in this release, especially with that long stretch of video toward the end. That said, I did eventually go through the entire game dozens of times and see everything there was to see and get every achievement. It took about 14 hours, but felt so much longer. Also, in order to replace the nudity, I installed and recorded the censored version. Also, about it not making for an interesting movie; quote:A year later, director Jeff Burr shot new footage in order to remake the project into a more linear movie version, however the negatives were damaged during the cutting process and was deemed to be a loss, leaving the planned feature film version unreleased as well.
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Jan 3, 2024 19:03
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quote:A year later, director Jeff Burr shot new footage in order to remake the project into a more linear movie version, however the negatives were damaged during the cutting process and was deemed to be a loss, leaving the planned feature film version unreleased as well. The inverse of this has happened a few times, where a low-budget movie was adapted for an FMV game using the same footage. One example that comes to mind is Soldier Boyz, a 1995 B-movie that was adapted into a 1997 PC game.
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Jan 3, 2024 21:50
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Kamen Rider ZO on Sega CD also comes to mind
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Jan 5, 2024 00:17
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 Here's almost 2 hours of Love Too Easily for you. I went through it again to make different choices and get a different ending, and I also explore the remaining* minigames. *There's a very good reason I couldn't figure out how to find the last one.
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Jan 8, 2024 20:20
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 Night Trap, the way it was meant to be played (apparently)! Playing the game over and over, taking notes along the way, until I had compiled a full timeline for being able to trap every enemy in the game in a single playthrough. Then I actually had to do that. Then I actually had to do that while dividing my attention between playing and talking.
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Jan 30, 2024 21:13
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Thank you for your sacrifice, James.
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Jan 30, 2024 21:55
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theenglishman posted:Thank you for your sacrifice, James. I gotta say, that after everything, I really ended up having a lot of fun with the game. It's far from perfect, but it's not a bad game by any stretch. The more I played, the more I enjoyed it, although it could drag on a bit at times, especially when taking notes and having to restart over and over again. What I think would have been more interesting, is if the story aspects tied in more to the gameplay. Like, you know how you have to observe what the new code color is? Things like that, except even more integrated into gameplay. You pick up on clues or see someone doing something, which you then utilize to make progress. I'm sure the technology at the time really limited what could be done with the concept, but I wonder if any modern FMV games do something like this.
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Jan 30, 2024 22:47
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Night Trap's idea is cool but also did need to make it more like that, yeah. I'd probably go for a game that took the idea and made it so you could do a run that either ignored the plot completely and just took things out before anyone encountered them, or only bothered to follow the characters and then saved them from threats that they bumped into or tried to mess with directly. Some sort of plot to what happens when you don't intervene with this or that threat immediately would also go a ways towards making it cooler; that way, instead of having your game just end because you didn't take out enough of the bad guys, you wind up with more scenes of them roaming around and then eventually a harder rescue situation if you really take too long. But, of course, that's also challenging to fulfill with FMV.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:28
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So now that James has posted that full run, Back in Oct after was started this I did my own stream of getting most of the achievements in the 25th. I say most cause when I went for the second stream I though I was having glitches or bugs but really the last couple of achievements had very specific circumstances to unlock. This does show all the endings though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grhoeF5uisU mateo360 fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jan 30, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 23:50
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I also did all the Retro Achievements for the Sega CD version of Night Trap; -As has been mentioned and shown, the intro is not only different, but you get an immediate game over if you don't manually switch over to the surveillance feed. -Danny, Lisa's little brother, does not have a possible death. This means the accompanying Auger is also not present, so there's only 99 captures in the game, instead of 100. -Failures usually don't result in an instant retry option. Instead, you're shown the credits. -The game was also spread across two discs, and where the 25th Anniversary Edition gives you a checkpoint is where you would originally switch discs. There is no checkpoint in the Sega CD version. -Early on, in the 25th Anniversary Edition, you can trap two Augers back-to-back in the bathroom. In the Sega CD version, the second Auger appears to only be trappable after they move into the bedroom. -This might just be an emulation thing, but getting a perfect game on the Sega CD version was REALLY hard, possibly due to the longer times to swap between rooms. Catching the final Auger and immediately having to switch to the bedroom to trap Sheila took so, so many attempts, because the window for trapping Sheila is very short and happens at the exact same time as the Auger.
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Jan 31, 2024 22:25
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 The 25th Anniversary Edition of Night Trap also lets you unlock Scene of the Crime, the original prototype created as part of development for the Control Vision. It's incredibly short and kind of awkward and confusing, but you can definitely see the potential in the concept, and so did the people at Hasbro (before they didn't and scrapped the Control Vision). So, bad news first; That does it not only for Night Trap, but for my backlog of videos. Good news; Calli's itching to get back to recording, so we should hopefully be back in action once March rolls around.
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Feb 16, 2024 21:52
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 What Is It? - Another experiment by Nick Box to game-ify their schlock short films. This time, the premise of the film is about a naive girl obsessed with vampires who meets a man on the internet because he told her vampires are real. Surprise! They're not! But what IS real is the cannibalistic old man that she is going to be fed to. The gameplay consists of watching a scene, and choosing one of three options to try and continue through the film to the end. Some options may show you unrelated footage (which you might not even realize isn't related because all this poo poo is nonsensical), while others just straight-up send you back multiple scenes. In other words, the negative consequences for this game are that you must watch more Nick Box. Amazing.
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Apr 5, 2024 21:09
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 What Is It? - From the people who brought you Dragon's Lair, comes Dragon's Lair... In Space! Dexter (who prefers to be called Ace) is joined by his partner Kimberly, as they try to stop the evil Borf from taking over Earth. He intends to do so by using his Infanto Ray, which reverts living creatures back into babies. Dexter takes a partial hit from his ray, causing him to become a younger, gangly version of himself. He can temporarily cure this by "Energizing" himself to become Ace again, which is helpful or necessary for dealing with the many obstacles in his way. This feels significantly more frantic than Dragon's Lair, but I also believe there are some slight branching paths in what you must face, depending on your actions. For example, the Energize function is context-sensitive and not always available, but you also don't always have to use it to get through a section. That said, I exclusively played the Dragon's Lair Trilogy version this time around instead of messing with emulation, and kept the prompts on, so I wasn't exactly experimenting with choice. Also, playing this way from the start resulted in me pretty much missing everything happening on screen because I was so focused in on the prompts. If you do wanna play this for yourself, I'd very much suggest you first spend 30 minutes, to an hour, WITHOUT using this, so you can actually experience the game in a somewhat more fulfilling manner.
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Apr 12, 2024 23:10
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 SPECIAL NOTE: No matter what I tried, every attempt at uploading to YouTube was met with the video being blocked globally for copyright content. As a result, I instead put it up on my Patreon, where it should be available to watch without needing to be logged in, and definitely viewable without needing to sign up for my Patreon. That said, if you wanna subscribe it'd be really, really awesome of you. I'm also planning on adding some more exclusive content in the future. What Is It? - To the anime lovers out there; yes, you ARE being gaslit. In the early days of LaserDisc arcade games, Stern Electronics would licence footage from a couple movies based on Lupin the 3rd to use as the basis for a Dragon's Lair-like FMV game. Since this was the early 80's, people in the US really didn't know what Lupin the 3rd was, and there was also no official English dub of the movies at the time. This let Stern have the freedom to repurpose the footage and adjust the narrative, to turn it into what you see in the video. This also lets me show off SINGE, an off-shoot of the DAPHNE emulator. I have a couple minor complaints about it, but I mostly really like how it's set up and the options available to the player for adjusting the game. DAPHNE has similar options (They're not so much emulators of the original handware/software, but emulators of the experience itself, allowing programmers to adjust the original games or even create brand-new ones), but SINGE has a very pleasing visual front-end, and supports more games/projects. They both have their uses though. Jamesman fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 20, 2024 01:35
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TapamN posted:There's also the predecessor to MODE, Gothos. It's a Vampire the Masquerade LARP as an FMV game. It works with the same "select a mood" conversation system as MODE, but it's implemented awkwardly. Several of the actors in Gothos also appeared in MODE. Oh poo poo, I did not realize Gothos was in the [MODE]iverse. I loving love [MODE], it's so dumb and specific.
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Apr 20, 2024 17:38
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I really try not to make a big stink about low views, but if I'm reading the analytics of the Cliff Hanger video properly, it has a whopping 2 whole views after being published over the weekend, and I'm pretty sure at least one of them is from me. It also has an average view duration of 7 minutes. So I just wanted to check in and learn more, since this is the first time I've had to do an upload like this. Is there an aversion to it being on Patreon, are there any problems accessing it, or is it just a general lack of interest in the game? I just wanna know for the future, in case I have to do something like this again.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:33
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I watched the whole thing so IDK what's up with that beyond a wild guess that something's up with the analytics. Unless I'm literally the only other person who did and then  I liked it.
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Apr 23, 2024 02:25
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I watched it in segments, as I wasn't able to see it all at once, so I guess that counts as 0 views if I didn't go through it in one sitting? I get that having that sort of count is difficult to measure accurately, but I'd guess it is more of the site's counter being wonky than anything. Going back to Space Ace, there is something less exciting about it, despite being a better done narrative with slightly better characters. The improvements don't really seem like much, though. Dragon's Lair had this neat experimental aleatoric vibe to it with the way you progressed, and it was kind of obvious in a fun way, kind of like seeing the strings is more entertaining than a half-measure to make it seem like they aren't there. I also recall that Space Ace came out so long after Dragon's Lair that it felt really stale by then.
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Apr 23, 2024 04:57
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Well, it's up to 9 impressions, and the average view duration has doubled from 7 minutes to 14. Still not sure what to make of it, but if nobody has any other input than "I watched it so maybe Patreon's just being fucky with its numbers" then I'll leave it at that. Like I said, I wasn't trying to make a stink about low views, but circumstances forced me to put this video up on Patreon instead of YouTube and the info I was getting off Patreon was shocking enough that I figured I'd ask if something was up. Hopefully no other videos will have problems like this moving forward.
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Apr 24, 2024 03:01
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It's cool, really understandable to check in and try to understand what's going on with weird metrics like that. Hopefully that gets fixed and/or you don't have to do that again too often.
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Apr 24, 2024 03:16
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 What Is It? - As a young girl, Erica witnessed the murder of her father. Now an adult, she's still plagued by nightmares of the incident, but she tries her best to put the past behind her. Easier said than done, when you receive a mysterious package in the mail one day... The police decide it's best for Erica to remain under protection at Delphi House, a mental health facility founded by her father. But is it really best for Erica? What is the connection between her father's death and what's happening now? Initially a PlayStation exclusive, the game was designed around using either the DualShock4's touch screen, or a smartphone app (no longer accessible on Android, at least). It's also really well shot and acted and we might have finally found a game Calli doesn't want to stab me for putting her through.
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Apr 26, 2024 21:29
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| # ? May 6, 2024 00:19 |
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 Hey while you're here, I'd like to mention I'll be streaming tonight at 8pm EST. Gonna play the DLC puzzle packs for QUBE 2, which is kinda like Portal except you have a magic glove and there's no portals. I previously streamed the base game a few years ago and loved it, and now I finally wanna do the DLC.
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May 2, 2024 20:26
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