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 In the year 2008, newly-formed development studio Eat Sleep Play, founded by David Jaffe and Scott Campbell, released their debut game, Twisted Metal: Head On Extra Twisted Edition. It was a port of a game their previous studio had made, but with practically an additional game's worth of bonus content, and buried within that bonus content were five frames that displayed random numbers. Those numbers, when arranged and converted to letters, read "METAL IS COMING ON PSTHREE," which fans correctly guessed meant that the studio would be making a Twisted Metal game for the next generation, with series creator David Jaffe returning to direct for the first time since Twisted Metal: Black. Every game Jaffe had touched up to that point had been pure gold, and the vehicular combat genre had never been presented on such a powerful platform, so excitement for this mysterious new title was explosive, and Eat Sleep Play capitalized on this by... going dormant for a full four years. The PS3 debut of Twisted Metal was originally planned to be little more than a downloadable PSN game, a very small and simple release with no plot or character stories, likely played from a top-down perspective. Sony urged them to include the trademark gameplay and story elements of the classic games in the series, and development grew out of control from there. After two years without any concrete updates, the developers and executives pointedly stopped answering questions about the status of Twisted Metal, until finally E3 of 2010 rolled around and the next game was given a surprise reveal, a vague but nonetheless official announcement that it was still in development and would be released in 2011. They blew past that release estimate, but at long last, on Valentine's Day 2012, Eat Sleep Play released their second game, simply called Twisted Metal. Twisted Metal (2012) is a reboot of the series, and things went awry during that long development cycle. At a glance, a lot of the gameplay will look familiar, but story progression is now completely linear, with only three characters that must be played in the designated order of Sweet Tooth, then Mr. Grimm, then Dollface. These characters, however, are functionally identical, as they can all choose to drive any vehicle at any time. The only time your character matters is during cutscenes, and oh my god the cutscenes. To help me handle the monotony of the campaign and the sheer horror of the story, I've had to bring in the help of co-commentators Kaboom Dragoon and Rutkowski, two fellow survivors of this game. "Cut Commentary" versions of each video where we don't talk over cutscenes are available with plain text links below the main video links, but I strongly suggest you let us minimize your suffering by talking over as much of the game as possible. Of course, it's not all bad, the highs here are very very high, but the lows are very very low, so before you watch anything, take heed of the following:  Content WarningsEvery cinematic in Twisted Metal (2012) is extremely violent, disturbing, and just plain gross. I do not expect anyone to find much to enjoy about them, and anyone sensitive to graphic sadistic murder will probably want to skip them entirely. If you experience motion sickness, epileptic seizures, or any other adverse physical reaction to intense, rapid movement and flashing lights, the gameplay will likely be very difficult or impossible for you to watch. NO SPOILERS, not even in spoiler tags This means no discussion of plot points and events that occur in upcoming cutscenes, and I also ask you not describe any vehicle or what it does until I've driven that vehicle in a video. Using the names of characters and vehicles that haven't appeared yet is fine so long as you don't go into any further detail, and open discussion of all other TM games is permitted. Also once I show off a vehicle, you can say whatever you want about it, if there's something I haven't shown about it yet it's probably because I don't know about it and you're welcome to tell me (Warthog is already fair game because I'm never going to unlock it). If you do choose to continue, familiarity with the rest of the Twisted Metal series is not required as this is a reboot, but there are a lot of in-jokes and references you'll miss. You can get yourself up to speed by watching my other TM Let's Plays: Let's Play Twisted Metal 1, 2, and Head On Let's Play Twisted Metal: Black Story (Playlist) THE TWISTED FATE OF SWEET TOOTH THE CLOWN    P1 Cut Commentary | P2 Cut Commentary | P3 Cut Commentary BONUS: Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale - Sweet Tooth Arcade Mode  MR. GRIMM'S DARK TRIP BACK    P1 Cut Commentary | P2 Cut Commentary | P3 Cut Commentary BONUS: War of the Monsters - Mecha Sweet Tooth Adventure Mode  Solo Commentary version | Group Commentary version THE MADNESS OF DOLLFACE    P1 Cut Commentary | P2 Cut Commentary | P3 Cut Commentary FINALE  Finale Cut Commentary Let's Plays are an obscene amount of work, particularly the "gawking at a train wreck" variety. If you'd like to make this worth my effort, you could always leave a tip! Fiendly fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Mar 7, 2020 04:56
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| # ? May 5, 2024 07:58 |
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One thing I noticed (or seemed to anyway) is that while you say Sweet Tooth has an inordinate amount of health, in general it looked like all the vehicles had too much health. The first level went on for way too long before enemies started dying.
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Mar 7, 2020 12:54
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About half the vehicles have far too much health, the other half are fragile as gently caress. In this video, I beat on Junkyard Dog for a while, rammed him a bunch, shot him, got him down to an invisible sliver of health, shot my special at him and drove away because there's no way he could survive it, then I had to double back when the damage value popped up but the notification of Junkyard Dog's death didn't. Then, a second later, I shot that same special at Reaper who was at a quarter health and got ready to chase him, but he immediately exploded from the special so I just drove through his corpse. A few points on the stat screen seem to translate to double or triple health values, it's a gigantic swing. EDIT: Also the pace of this game is the opposite of Head On's, where most cars have about 100 hp and most attacks do 10-20 damage. You're not supposed to kill opponents as fast here as we just did there, and it's a matter of interpretation as to whether that's a good thing or not (it's definitely not) Fiendly fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Mar 7, 2020 |
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Mar 7, 2020 14:07
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The only vehicle I liked was a special vehicle used only sparingly.
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Mar 7, 2020 16:14
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Yesssssss I was hoping you'd do this poo poo show of a game. I loved it when it came out, but it......hasn't aged well. Also the harder difficulties are some bull. poo poo.
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Mar 7, 2020 16:45
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I'm sorry for eventually driving Fiendly insane by giving him the suggestion to LP this game. Okay I'm not sorry. Let's go Content Warning: The Game!
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Mar 7, 2020 20:37
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I just got it in my head to look up the thing Kaboom Dragoon talked about where you could shoot a truck to celebrate the release of this game, and I found some videos of the event still up on youtube. Here's a promotional video where David Jaffe himself fires the first shots at a real, once-drivable Sweet Tooth ice cream truck, and here are the final shots of the event two days later.
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Mar 8, 2020 22:26
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The main banner link goes to your final video of Head On. Not to imply that Twisted Metal wasn't ever a gigantic mess of a series that didn't have much of an idea of to do with itself but everyone chasing the multiplayer/Call of Duty high, including the console makers themselves, produced so many dead ends during those PS3/X360 years. But at least Jaffe finally got to indulge that passion for horror movies we saw back in the very first game.
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Mar 9, 2020 19:07
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Fiendly posted:I just got it in my head to look up the thing Kaboom Dragoon talked about where you could shoot a truck to celebrate the release of this game, and I found some videos of the event still up on youtube. Here's a promotional video where David Jaffe himself fires the first shots at a real, once-drivable Sweet Tooth ice cream truck, and here are the final shots of the event two days later. Huh, I could've sworn it lasted longer than that. Told you it was a thing though, it was one of the weirdest PR stunts that had nothing to do with Acclaim or EA, so it sticks in the mind. Also, so sad hearing Jaffe getting excited about a Twisted Metal movie. He's like David Cage in that, he so desperately wants to break into Hollywood, but his self-indulgent messes are more fun to watch and the car crashes a lot more literal.
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Mar 9, 2020 20:09
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Kibayasu posted:The main banner link goes to your final video of Head On. Sure did! Thanks, I fixed it. Kaboom Dragoon posted:Huh, I could've sworn it lasted longer than that. Told you it was a thing though, it was one of the weirdest PR stunts that had nothing to do with Acclaim or EA, so it sticks in the mind. Also, so sad hearing Jaffe getting excited about a Twisted Metal movie. He's like David Cage in that, he so desperately wants to break into Hollywood, but his self-indulgent messes are more fun to watch and the car crashes a lot more literal. All reporting about the Twisted Metal TV series that's supposedly being worked on makes it clear that Jaffe keeps reaching out to the production, all but begging to help, and being rejected. He is a better filmmaker than most game devs, but that's not saying a goddamn thing, and it also seems like he's not allowed to make games anymore so we're really doing a postmortem on his career here.
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Mar 9, 2020 20:18
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I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t seen your videos from the old Twisted Metal thread yet, BUT terrible (and possibly interesting) games from the late aughts and early 2010s are right up my alley, so this is as good a gateway into the series as ever I guess.
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Mar 9, 2020 22:01
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theenglishman posted:this is as good a gateway into the series as ever I guess. Very much so! Doesn't paint the greatest picture of what Twisted Metal is all about, but it's got the most modern sensibilities of any game released so far, unfortunately trapped in that brief moment in the early 2010s where many beloved game franchises underwent the same horrible transformation comic books went through in the 90s. Might be interesting to hear from the perspective of someone with no preconceived notions about the older games if this remake stands on its own and holds up in a modern context. Update: Sweet Tooth Part 2 | cut commentary Here's where I really turned on the game in my original playthrough, our first long, difficult level and an extreme worsening of the character we're forced to play as. Why would anyone want THIS Sweet Tooth to get his wish, especially when it's this hard and random? I sure didn't, but now you can judge for yourself.
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Mar 10, 2020 05:29
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There was some weapon or other thing that you used that had a little animation show up in a grey box in the upper right corner. Around 25:40. Is that for the remote bomb?
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Mar 11, 2020 01:40
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That was indeed the remote bomb, that greyscale picture-in-picture shows what's taking place in the vicinity of the bomb after it is set, there are a few attacks that work that way, most of them specials. It's a largely useless feature, there's too much going on with the game already to keep track of another thing, but it's an attempt to use the PS3's capabilities to improve gameplay at least.
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Mar 11, 2020 03:33
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Update: Sweet Tooth Part 3 | cut commentary One story down. Still haven't gotten around to explaining it in a video, but we'll be going through three different stories in this completely linear game, so next time we drive, it'll be as Mr. Grimm (who is functionally identical to Sweet Tooth)
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Mar 15, 2020 01:19
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So is the first time in the entire series where Sweet Tooth finally gets what's coming to him, because god drat that was actually satisfying.
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Mar 15, 2020 02:11
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I remember Carmageddon 2 having you either try to win a race, or destroy all the competitors before they win it. Which was cool, you contended with the opponents that would like you be trying to smash everyone to pieces, but also had to watch out for the racer type cars and crush them before they complete all the laps. But then, you had a few annoying levels where you had to finish the race, and it always immediately sucked all the fun out of the game for me. e: also, video ending spoilers, you could say that in a way, by dying in this Twisted Metal race, those Grimm brothers did get Sweet Tooth killed, which is why they get to participate in the next one? 
Zanzibar Ham fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Mar 15, 2020 |
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Mar 15, 2020 02:12
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PlasticAutomaton posted:So is the first time in the entire series where Sweet Tooth finally gets what's coming to him, because god drat that was actually satisfying. In Twisted Metal 3, every ending has the wisher getting hosed, but they're also all silly and pointless so it's not very satisfying. I think Small Brawl also monkey's paws him, with similar results.
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Mar 15, 2020 15:23
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I think it was Twisted Metal 4, when Sweet Tooth deposes Calypso as the head honcho, where a happy go lucky All American Family drives an RV in the contest and their wish was to go on a roadtrip with Sweet Tooth as their driver. In their ending Sweet Tooth eventually drives himself and the rest of them off a cliff to escape the annoyance. That was at least a pretty impressive amount of destruction going on in the boss fight. Reminds me of Bad Company 2 where a large part of the point is to only have a moonscape left when you're finished.
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Mar 16, 2020 07:22
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It's an interesting twist(ed Metal hahahoohoo) that you can outmaneuver the Brothers by driving into/under the gigantic monster trucks known in popular culture for crushing small puny cars like the one you're driving in that level.
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Mar 16, 2020 10:17
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Zanzibar Ham posted:I remember Carmageddon 2 having you either try to win a race, or destroy all the competitors before they win it. Which was cool, you contended with the opponents that would like you be trying to smash everyone to pieces, but also had to watch out for the racer type cars and crush them before they complete all the laps.  They'll drive around the track if they feel like it, but only the player can win the race by hitting all the checkpoints. This was probably done because it'd really suck if you were exploring the level or chasing pedestrians and then suddenly lost the event because some rear end in a top hat raced like a normal person.Carmageddon: Max Damage has separate Death Race events in which the ostensible goal is to race, but if you don't want to bother with it you can wait for the opponents to complete a lap and then kill them to steal their laps. DMorbid fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Mar 16, 2020 |
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Mar 16, 2020 10:29
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Doc M posted:The opponents in Carmageddon never complete all the laps! That's probably for the best, as you said I'd probably be mad if that happened.
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Mar 16, 2020 10:34
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BONUS - Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale with Sweet Tooth hi
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Mar 31, 2020 12:56
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I have to say, I completely forgot Playstation All Stars existed. As something awkward and passionless modern Twisted Metal fits right it. Probably got replaced by Sonic All Stars in my head which was also a shameless copy of another Nintendo series but also really good itself.
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Apr 5, 2020 06:53
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I agree about PlayStation All Stars being totally soulless. I don't full understand Sony: sometimes they're on the cutting edge of technology and have a lot of great, unique ideas...but then sometimes they get a knee jerk reaction to something Nintendo does and they decide they have to do the Great Values version of that feature. Remember the PS3 controller that had really bad motion features added in because Nintendo had just unveiled the Wii?
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Apr 5, 2020 18:06
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Kibayasu posted:I have to say, I completely forgot Playstation All Stars existed. As something awkward and passionless modern Twisted Metal fits right it. Probably got replaced by Sonic All Stars in my head which was also a shameless copy of another Nintendo series but also really good itself. Yeah, I really liked Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing so I was ready for "popular Nintendo franchise with the serial numbers filed off" to be good. Sega All-Stars and Playstation All-Stars were both competing with the Wii installments of Mario Kart and Smash Bros respectively, which to me are the worst installments of both series. The time was right for the rip-offs to surpass their inspirations, but only one of them managed to do so. Truman Sticks posted:Remember the PS3 controller that had really bad motion features added in because Nintendo had just unveiled the Wii? Oh god, "sixaxis" as it was called was a disaster. Most games had phased it out within a year of the PS3's release, but Twisted Metal still shoehorned it in years and years later. Sweet Tooth and possibly some other vehicles have special moves that can only be performed using weird distracting sixaxis flicks of the controller, but I can't be bothered to learn them and I think my controller doesn't even support sixaxis so we won't be seeing them except when the AI does them. Anyway, new character time. Mr. Grimm is, as usual, my favorite character, even though there's no difference between him and the others, there's discernible humanity to the way he's written for a change, and he gives me an excuse to bring back Reaper. edit: superior version with corrected audio now available Update: Mr. Grimm Part 1 | cut commentary Fiendly fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 07:17
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Fiendly posted:BONUS - Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale with Sweet Tooth lmao, amazing. i did a couple of run-throughs of PSAS as bonus videos in my own LPs. maybe over the years the SA forum as a collective will finally LP the entire game. it's certainly not enjoyable enough to want to do an entire Let's Play on its own, man. as an aside: Fat Princess was a PS3 title first, later ported to the PSP!
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Apr 7, 2020 07:30
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A full LP of Playstation All-Stars would be agonizing, both to make and to watch. The whole "invasion" gimmick, which stands out as the game's most unique and objectively good feature, comes with the drawback of being 100% scripted to play out the same way every single time, so every level is basically a cutscene with arbitrarily-placed platforms in front of it. Once you've seen a level once, you've seen every possible iteration of what can happen, so if someone were to make sure each of the 14 levels (and 2 DLC levels) were played through just once, we'd have as complete an LP as anyone could need. You could say I'm real disappointed with how bad All-Stars turned out to be.
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Apr 7, 2020 22:45
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If it wasn't obvious before its really starting to come across just how anemic the single player is. Even though the levels are different sections if they take place in the same level with the same look it really dampens any sense of progression. Not having unique vehicles for unique characters means it plays the same all the time, you don't need to adapt and adjust to different specials or handling.
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Apr 10, 2020 20:07
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Kibayasu posted:If it wasn't obvious before its really starting to come across just how anemic the single player is. Even though the levels are different sections if they take place in the same level with the same look it really dampens any sense of progression. Not having unique vehicles for unique characters means it plays the same all the time, you don't need to adapt and adjust to different specials or handling. Absolutely this. I like to say that Twisted Metal is barely a video game, the single player is an arbitrary series of meaningless tasks and the multiplayer no longer exists, so all you're left with is monotony. To be as brutally fair as possible, they're coming off a series where you play the exact same campaign 12-17 times or until you get bored, but that campaign always felt carefully crafted and playing it with different vehicles does make for a markedly different experience. Like you said, a possible fix would be to divvy up the 15 vehicles (ignoring Axel and Warthog) between the three characters so each only has access to five cars. Then the characters actually feel unique, and the redundant vehicles have a reason to exist.
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Apr 10, 2020 23:54
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change thread title to "What's duller than Black?". Twisted Metal Black was a fine game to end the series on.
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Apr 11, 2020 02:15
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Dash Rendar posted:Twisted Metal Black was a fine game to end the series on. Its release in 2001 was already past the expiration date on the car combat trend, so even though most of the TM games that followed were still good, it would indeed have made a good swan song for the genre. I definitely think there's room to crank out a new one each console generation to show off what can be done with the formula on the latest hardware, but TM2012 seems to show that it takes huge expensive teams to get anything done since the PS2 and these developers no longer have the kind of sway to pull that off, so we are unfortunately in the longest drought in the series history with no end in sight. Update: Mr. Grimm Part 2 | cut commentary I know you're expecting a continuation of Grimm's campaign, but instead the game has decided to start a new character's story while Grimm aimlessly stumbles through Calypso's half-baked ideas in the background. At least we get to see a new level (a quarter mile at a time because it's a cage match and we have to stick to small designated sections)
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Apr 15, 2020 04:12
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Oh noes... Calypso is Actual Satan! Who could have known without that utterly pointless cut scene?! This is game truly is All Balls.
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Apr 15, 2020 17:36
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AltaBrown posted:Oh noes... Calypso is Actual Satan! Who could have known without that utterly pointless cut scene?! So would that mean that ghost girl was the daughter of Satan, or is that retconned? Or both, I dunno.
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Apr 15, 2020 17:39
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Zanzibar Ham posted:So would that mean that ghost girl was the daughter of Satan, or is that retconned? Or both, I dunno. Let's give this game's plot more thought than David Jaffe did: Calypso and Ghost Girl are an obvious inversion of the 3-as-1 Holy Trinity; whereas Chrisitanity has The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, TM has Calypso, Ghost Girl and Actual Satan.
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Apr 15, 2020 18:22
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Zanzibar Ham posted:So would that mean that ghost girl was the daughter of Satan, or is that retconned? Fully retconned. Krista Sparks (Calypso's daughter in the rest of the series) is the name of a completely unrelated character in this game. CalypSatan has no known offspring
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Apr 15, 2020 19:42
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That was a really cool looking theme park that you weren't allowed to drive through at all.
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Apr 16, 2020 19:48
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FoolyCharged posted:That was a really cool looking theme park that you weren't allowed to drive through at all. The best part is: that was the only time we get to see it in story mode. You would think that with 8 overdesigned levels and 6 stages per character campaign, each campaign would use 6 different levels, and maybe throw in a choice of levels every so often like Black and Head On did. Instead, there are two levels that are only used once while Sunsprings is used 4 times and Diablo Canyon is used 3 times (all other levels appear twice). A baffling waste of assets.
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Apr 16, 2020 20:36
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man. And after Black let you release a ferris wheel to run amock through a town too!
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Apr 16, 2020 20:55
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Having played/watched this at a friends house when it came out, based on what I remember of the "plot" cutscenes at the end of the game I got the impression that they had planned to have more characters playable and more "story arcs". (Heavy air quotes there considering what was shipped) That would also make sense if they had all of these over developed levels and assets, they might have been planning to have a couple different events in each level area, but ran out of time and just shipped with the three 'k'uality stories/level selections we got.
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Apr 17, 2020 07:41
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