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Bacter posted:EDIT: Uh, ok, so "Roadside Picnic", maybe their most famous short story? is a PRETTY clear inspiration, dealing as it does with aliens who come to earth in what's called "The Visitation", and leave behind a bunch of weird artifacts that people explore. The game does significantly depart from the story, in that there's no second visitation, and in a couple other ways. Bobbin Threadbare's LP of "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" contains an episode that does a pretty deep dive on "Roadside Picnic". Episode 21, I think.
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Jun 27, 2017 21:05
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Right you are! Here for listening pleasure
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Jun 28, 2017 01:24
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I have been looking for an opportunity to do Roadside Picnic with my students for years. Just can't find time with all the other things we have to do. Really good story and inspired scads of stuff, as you noticed.
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Jun 28, 2017 04:27
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Awww yeah! Sorry for the break everybody, I knew a big rush at work was coming, which was why I wanted to do a big push and get most of it out. The rush hit, so there was that delay but I got a reprieve!   So this is it for the main game! I'd really like to hear what you think. There's a lot to unpack, a lot to enjoy, and, honestly, a lot to be frustrated with. This isn't some flawless work by any means, so if you think the ending doesn't hold water, I'd like to hear about that, too. On a.... probably fourth replay? I'd say I like it overall. Also, while I've held off on adding any music of my own, I really couldn't resist with the credit sequence. Normally there isn't any music at all during it, just ambient noises, but I've added in "Psyche Rock", the remix by Fatboy Slim.
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Jul 10, 2017 16:43
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Now, a note about the DLC. I mentioned that there was a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad design decision associated with it. Here it is In every level of the DLC, there is a survivor you can pick up. You can only travel with one survivor at a time, and there are ~10 levels. But each survivor has unique dialogue, so to get the "full" story, you'd need to play the game once keeping the first survivor the whole time, then another time getting the first survivor, then dropping him for the second survivor (or not picking up the first at all, it doesn't matter), and keeping the SECOND survivor straight through, then another time with the third survivor... just, more than 10 playthroughs. It's unbelievably tedious!
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Jul 10, 2017 18:05
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Thanks for this, Bacter. It's been a weird, beautiful, darkly meditative experience. The subtitled LP is definitely the best way to experience it (possibly even above playing the game yourself), letting the game create the soundscape it wants us to experience, and there's clearly a lot of merit to it, even if I can also understand why a lot of people would bounce right off. The translation is janky, the game itself gets in the way of the player trying to understand it, and even if you do follow along then it cuts right under your budding power fantasy. I'd interpret the message of the game, if indeed there is a single thing to take away (there's definitely not just one), by suggesting that the regular characters were all totally screwed right from the start, because the people they gave unquestioned authority to did not have their best interests at heart and it's so difficult to topple unscrupulous people from that podium of blind faith. One good person with the right opportunity - one idol of the people to topple the previous idols of the people, if you will - just isn't enough to change the world, no matter how hard he might try. It has to be a greater, communal effort to understand the messy, difficult realities of the world and work to overcome them - if you ever collectively give that up to a few powerful men then the worst parts of history will repeat themselves. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it, and the game's ultimate moral is not to leave your shelter in the middle of an apocalypse. Maybe we could've become that one paranoid guy stocking up guns and ammo in his bunk locker, waiting for things to go bad.
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Jul 10, 2017 19:07
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There's also the more direct metaphor the hunter gives the train conductor with his 'Boy it must be nice to be a Train Conductor' spiel. Namely that just doing your job and going with the flow will only get you so far in the end. Also that you don't have a lot of control over your destination (after all, you're riding the rails not laying them out etc.) Do wish the train sections were better about hearing the conversations while maintaining the train though. That's somewhat annoying.
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Jul 10, 2017 21:32
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EponymousMrYar posted:There's also the more direct metaphor the hunter gives the train conductor with his 'Boy it must be nice to be a Train Conductor' spiel. Namely that just doing your job and going with the flow will only get you so far in the end. Also that you don't have a lot of control over your destination (after all, you're riding the rails not laying them out etc.) Just jumping off of this, following orders and doing what you're told, including following a rote list of instructions in How to Be Good, is not enough. But perhaps nothing is. You can also see the survival of some white eyes as a metaphor for Calvinist ideas of salvation. Maybe only god's grace is enough -- maybe surviving was just a matter of luck. The white eyes might have been the Elect, or they might have won against bad odds. The white eyes don't seem like they were necessarily special before their exposures to the gas. That can easily be self congratulatory bullshit that the guys on top are using to excuse mass murder. The others may accept this because it salves their own feelings of guilt and remorse. They're just special is all. It couldn't be helped. Extraordinary people should t be bound by conventional morality and so forth.
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Jul 11, 2017 01:35
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WFGuy posted:I'd interpret the message of the game, if indeed there is a single thing to take away (there's definitely not just one), by suggesting that the regular characters were all totally screwed right from the start, because the people they gave unquestioned authority to did not have their best interests at heart and it's so difficult to topple unscrupulous people from that podium of blind faith. Yeah, I wonder if the Guardian ultimately ended up being just a big show and those giant scratches are the hunter's white-eyes gunshots.
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Jul 11, 2017 01:42
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Yeah, I can't help but read some Classic Eastern European Fatalism into this. The Strugatsky brothers works that this dev team drew from were, for the most part, much more positive, but DID entail a fundamental change in people from a lower to a higher form, and that WAS one of the stated goals of Communism. But if you weren't Russia, the experience of this was that you got invaded for nebulous reasons, and the actual people doing the invading were more than likely sort of aloof and capricious (if not outright sadistic, which we haven't seen any white-eyes be). A few people I'm sure gained tremendous power and influence by collaborating with the party, but the party was also corrupt, and things just kind of spiraled down. As with any work of fiction, it can be hard to gauge how in-tune the author is with how their creation sounds. For instance, I read a lot of self-serving and arrogant self-satisfaction out of the white-eyes, without really seeing any evidence of that. It COULD be that they're meant to be these hyper-intelligent beings just SO FAR BEYOND human ken, but, if so, the authors didn't convey that (I'd argue). OR they may have totally intended for them to come off that way, and my rankling is what they were hoping for. I'm still going to ask them a packet of questions, and I might include something about the so-called white-eyes superiority. Bacter fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Jul 11, 2017 |
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Jul 11, 2017 03:15
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A small detail I liked was how the railroad messaging system slowly had more and more people drop off the board- it really helps reinforce that things were continuing to fall apart with no replacements.
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Jul 11, 2017 03:22
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You know, I think it was nice of the Hunter to let the process finish before pulling the trigger. Even though he was white-eyes, he was extremely respectful of our character until the cut to black. Of course, in a way, I don't think he wanted to do what he had to do. One of his lines suggested quite strongly that his last shot was the last one he needed in this particular conflict.
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Jul 11, 2017 03:41
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The communism angle is interesting, but like, the 'settlers' thing, gassing undesirables, the white eyed superior race, TRAINS… if that's not gesturing broadly in the direction of The Holocaust I don't know.
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Jul 11, 2017 03:48
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Yeah uh.... huh. Honestly didn't make that connection, but it's just right there, isn't it. Edit: That said, it's not really perfect either. The gas is a separating element here, where everybody is gassed and those who can "stand it" will pull themselves through. The Nazis (at least pretended that they) thought that there already WAS a coherent, evolved group of humans, and they just needed to seize control from the parasitic elements of society and take their rightful place as leaders. It's similar, but one was, in theory, more about blood and racial identity, and one was about a person changing the way they related to the state - from a consumer, totally self-focused, to a generous and philosophical worker, contributing for the good of society. Of course, BOTH regimes ended up being about trying not to get stepped on by demagogues, but. Bacter fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Jul 11, 2017 |
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Jul 11, 2017 06:29
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The settler's and their discrimination is one of the things that I find harder to wrap my head around in relation to tying the whole thing together. I mean, on the surface it's a fairly standard 'don't trust them they were the ones who went into the crazy alien zone and came back they're probably in on it!' with the subtext of 'pushing distrust on the one group of people who actually know the face of the enemy and thus are more likely to know what's actually going on' subversion. But aside from that there's a lot more talk the game puts on them than would warrant it. Then again, I'm taking the 'rising up to a higher being' thing with a grain of salt and the game spends quite a bit of time talking that up as well. Technically they are superior by merit of not devolving at exposure to the gas and thus have apparent immunity to it but that's pretty much where their superiority ends from all of the actual evidence presented. They're still normal people doing their thing, up to and including the ringleaders who have a new scheme to get the new masses invested in. Considering the performance of the Guardian, they shouldn't be putting much stock in but it's another sign of the status quo that they're going along with the portal thing. Which puts something of a cyclical nature to the process. Today it's strain 2 of a Gas that converts human beings into something 'better' while everyone pins their hopes on a Giant Robot, tomorrow it's probably going to be strain 3 of that Gas while everyone builds the delivery mechanism for it disguised as 'they accept us and will now supply us with stuff we need.' It's entirely possible that there are no aliens anymore (considering the reverse engineering of their First Visitation tech and all) and it's the ringleaders that are all doing this in order to drastically change society because as it stands things are on the down trend.
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Jul 11, 2017 06:54
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First of all, thanks so much for this LP. It's been a really fun watch! With the main game over there are two questions that stick out to me. One is kind of dumb, but I still find myself wondering about it. What was the deal with the two soldiers towards the beginning? While I suppose them disappearing into bloodstains is meant to be spooky, it just strikes me as really weird. I wonder just what the deal was. Was it imagery the writers absolutely wanted in the game or does it hint at something in the broader story? The other question that sticks out to me is, well, is there a "them"? The entire game, we're led to believe there was a "Visitation' in which some unknown force invaded. We see soldiers and hear the sounds of warfare, but we never get any real hints of what's going on besides the weird spider borg. Was there actually an antagonistic force? The president at the end does seem to imply the white-eyes are working with someone outside the country. Is it "them"? It seems to be that there was something, or else how would that kind of crazy technology have been discovered?
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Jul 11, 2017 07:53
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Bummer of an ending, but others have written about it in better detail than I. Thanks for LP, Bax.
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Jul 11, 2017 11:25
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It's odd, but to me in many ways going Goo-man at the end is a relief. That I'm far from sure I'd WANT to be a white eyes given what we see. Is a white eyes essentially just you upgraded? Or is it a new person wearing your old body as a meatsuit with you either de-facto dead or stuck behind your own eyes screaming internally? While I'd rather take my chances with going white-eyes, at least the Goo-man fate has certainity going for it.
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Jul 11, 2017 14:35
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A quite nihilistic, but strangely satisfying ending. While part of me would like to have more information how this world works (The Blacksmith, alien train engine program, first visitation zone), to much explaining of technicalities would maybe ruin some of the mood of the story. Other stuff seems there to citate the works of the Strugatzky brothers (i admit it has been years i read some of their stuff) and the black goo monsters seems to spring from japanese folklore. The only part i find unredeemingly awful is stuffing the npc banter in the hectic train travel minigame. There is replay value and there is this. Thanks for the lp, bacter. I look forward to the DLC.
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Jul 11, 2017 16:30
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There are less answers than questions in this game, but I think that's because the setting is just that, a backdrop. I think it's just a story about one person trying, and failing, to get back home to their family. Whether you sacrifice others or save them hoping they will assist you, that's just you deciding which dots to connect on your journey.
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Jul 11, 2017 16:30
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Whatever the story was about, I don't think an action/resource management video game is a good format for it? The backdrops/timeskips were slick and great, but I don't feel like the gameplay served the story. I enjoyed my time watching this LP, but probably would have shelved it playing myself. On the other hand, an indie book or short film probably wouldn't have made it onto my radar. Mordecai fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jul 18, 2017 |
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Jul 18, 2017 22:36
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It certainly made the story play interestingly. OK FOLKS, DLC TIME Sorry for the delay, but, while I DO complain about this in the DLC videos themselves, I don't like how this one part of the DLC goes enough to re-complain about it here. So there are 11 combat levels in the DLC, and a few non-combat levels. In each combat level, there is a survivor. You can only take one survivor with you, so taking one means dropping the one you have. Each survivor has unique dialogue on the transition between levels. Additionally, there is special dialogue for when you don't take ANY survivors. This means that, if you aren't using hack-y methods (like what I did!), you would need to play the 13-level DLC through 12 times to get all the dialogue. That is 156 levels, and while the game is pretty and the dialogue is neat, it is NOT worth it. I did the trick of copying my save file at each level, so I could re-start from level 2 after the first playthrough, then level 3, and so on, roughly halving the number of individual levels I had to play. It's brutal, it's not interesting (I might recommend two or MAYBE three playthroughs to get everything, but 12 is absurd), and I KNOW they want you to do it, because there's an achievement for "finishing" each storyline. The other thing is, while some storylines are VERY deep, informative, and provide useful looks into the world of Final Station, I'd say roughly half of them are just *this character has personality trait x. Watch as their dialogue reflects that!* and doesn't really add anything at ALL. It's frustrating, but I've stitched together all the dialogue sections for you guys so you get the benefit without any of the tooth-grinding repetition! With that caveat out of the way, I'm a really big fan of the DLC. It's got basically all of my favorite levels, it adds to the story without being cheap, and it has a different enough emotional tone that I think it was worthwhile. Also, I'm open to suggestions for who "The Only Traitor" is! There are ~3-4 possibilities that I see. FIRST PART GO   The Missed Document is here Bacter fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jul 27, 2017 |
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Jul 27, 2017 02:01
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I am now wondering if the white eyes actually know what They want and are working in concert or if they have just convinced themselves they were spared for a grand purpose. Are They the kaiju that trashed the guardian or something else holding the leash? Maybe the Traitor refers to the only person on the council who didn't betray humanity and therefore betrayed the council?
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Jul 27, 2017 14:11
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Odd. The framerate always drops during the first car dialogue with Jesse. It seems pretty much hinted at this point with the museum exhibition that a fourth council man is something of a "persona non grata" for the ruling government. We already know form the first game, that Vermond jr. and Thornton jr. are major players for the white eyes. So he tried to counteract against some of their plans?
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Jul 28, 2017 20:01
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Yeah, I think that's because each dialogue was obtained on a different playthrough, and Jesse's was the last one I did before fixing a few things to try and up the framerate. Anyway: I agree that ADAM THORNTON is a fine candidate for being The Only Traitor. If this were true, then he would be the only member of the council to try and stop Their plans! There are a few more, and hint hint, we might get a subtle clue about who one of them might be in this update! Youtube made it harder to add buttons to skip you around in videos lately, so in the interest of public service, I'm going to add gameplay level start times to the video in case for some reason you don't want to watch all the reactions every time. I would recommend that you at LEAST hear the curator's though!  
Bacter fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 16:46
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I wonder how many people turned into White Eyes, only to get slaughtered by goo people? Also, if the First Visitation had the 30+' tall monsters, where the hell did they go afterwards? Did they drop dead? Vanish into air? Or were they somehow confined within the borders of the first country?
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Jul 29, 2017 20:22
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Yeah, and in fact the game is claiming that they are in fact stomping around RIGHT NOW, it's just that our heroes never happen to actually run into them. SKEPTICISM INTENSIFIES Now, that said, the sci-fi story this game is based on also had aliens as major characters that are never seen or described in the main story, but...
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Jul 30, 2017 02:15
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With the format of this (thanks for playing this 12 times too I guess  ) I'm enjoying the image in my head of everyone just cramming into our muscle car.
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Aug 7, 2017 05:20
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Kibayasu posted:With the format of this (thanks for playing this 12 times too I guess I was thinking today how cool it would be if we had a really big van or even a semi, and our choice of companion was really just seeing who we wanted to put in the cab up front with us for conversation. I loved the explosion from our brewer friend there at the end.
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Aug 12, 2017 20:57
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Brewerfriend is best. My beef isn't really that I don't LIKE all the different companions? It's just that MOST of them aren't worth a separate playthrough. Maybe if there had been... I don't know, three or four, and each of them had different information that really shed a light on the world, that'd be fine? Well, I really like the ending. AND HERE IT IIIIIIIIIS So the ending to this DLC... people can feel different ways about it. Some love, some hate, I'm more towards love but I could imagine somebody being not there. It's certainly not standard, and I'm including the main game's ending in the "standard" category, subcategory G, standard bleak. Though it had twists of it's own, ahhhh just watch it! Let me know what you think, droogs! I'll have more to say later  
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Aug 19, 2017 17:56
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There's some subtitles running over themselves in 3A at 9:07.
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Aug 19, 2017 20:19
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Well that was a neat game. I went ahead and picked it up myself. I have to really thank you for getting all those dialogues, I can't imagine what a pain it was to play the game so many times to get them for us. I think it rather nice that who is the Only Traitor can be up to interpretation. Is it Arthur, Peter, or one of the many other shady people we have found out about? POOL IS CLOSED posted:There's some subtitles running over themselves in 3A at 9:07. There also seems to be some additional overlapping subtitles beginning at 14:47 or so in video 3A. You have also seemed to forgotten to link the missed documents from video 2B in the thread. Once again thanks for giving us another nice LP. The subtitles were are particularly nice approach for this game.
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Aug 20, 2017 10:16
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Yeah, I can see the Half-Life influences in the weird dimensional space. Somehow I can picture exactly what it would look like in 3D, too.
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Aug 20, 2017 20:16
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Like the main game, there is some very beautiful pixel art in the game. The whole worldbuilding through npc banter works way better with the lack of some awful car minigame. I can't really say, if i like or dislike the dlc ending. It is somewhat like watching the ending of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" (1979). Those things don't exactly come a conclusion of a storyarc, they just tend to "happen".
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Aug 20, 2017 21:06
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:There's some subtitles running over themselves in 3A at 9:07. On these! Yeah - the art was a major high point for me. I honestly don't know how I'd rate the game if it was uglier. Like if the game was a text adventure? I have no idea. "EXITS ARE N, W, AND MAGICAL SPACE LAND"
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Aug 21, 2017 21:48
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Bacter posted:On these! Space madness would be an alright explanation of what went down, though.
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Aug 21, 2017 21:50
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:Space madness would be an alright explanation of what went down, though. But no excuse for space rudeness.
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Aug 22, 2017 00:24
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chiasaur11 posted:But no excuse for space rudeness. There's always spacetime for courtesy. 
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Aug 22, 2017 00:32
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Maybe the "traitor" is philosophical, like "the only traitor is human nature." That seems a bit of a cop out but also in keeping with a lot of what we saw.
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Aug 22, 2017 14:06
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So, probable candidates for being The Only Traitor: Adam Thornton : Being that he had a seat on the council, a notoriously alien-friendly institution, but went against their wishes to try to save humanity. Hunter : Being that most of the other members of the council seem to have been, at least initially, working for their own benefit. The hunter appears to be actively converting the other members into white-eyes and just generally working for the aliens (or for himself? look, we never actually learn what it is the aliens want, so). There' also a huge painting of him that Adam had stolen and vandalized presumably himself with the word "TRAITOR". So... Peter, the hero of the DLC : This one is my personal bet, in that we are in fact the only... triple agent? I guess? We're the only member of the initial game's passengers to be secretly working for the aliens (if you don't count that one guy who was leaking black goo that we found in the tunnels, but he didn't really seem to have much of an agenda at all). Not ONLY that, but in my interpretation of the events of the game, we realized that the train conductor was a good guy and was taking us to the L-ABS bunker himself, so we didn't need to kill him at all, making us a traitor to the hunter/aliens who hired us to be a traitor to humanity/the conductor. PRETTY TRAITISH! (Also: content edit - they evidently went back and updated the English translation with help from a fan! I'm kind of interested to see how much better it is) Bacter fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Aug 25, 2017 |
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Aug 25, 2017 22:19
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