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[PATV] Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 8: Games You REALLY Might Not Have
Dog
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
[PATV] Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 8: Games You REALLY Might Not Have Tried
This week, we pull out some creepy games you REALLY may never have heard of.
Come discuss this topic in the forums!
Follow the download/purchase links to play these games: Memories of a Broken Dimension, Castle Doctrine, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, No One Has To Die, Starseed Pilgrim, OFF, Pathologic, Song of Saya (Saya no Uta), Outlast
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For instance, telling people what the different block types are or explaining what the goal is or how things change, does not reduce the mastery in how you use the blocks, how you get to the goals and how you utilise the changes the game presents.
However I do think that you should avoid saying as much as you can, as the discovery is a part of the magic of the game. But it is important for people who are frustrated with the game, or want to know more about it etc, that they know that knowing more about it does not remove the wonderful mechanics that the game presents.
Other than that, the only one I've played is I Have No Mouth, which is exactly as described. It is also as of recently added to both Steam and GoG, and I believe it is on sale on both for under five bucks. Hard to beat that price, for a singular experience.
http://thiscageisworms.com/2013/07/24/on-why-i-will-never-play-the-castle-doctrine/
I would love to say things about it where Extra Credits did not, but it would really spoil it for you. You have to go in without knowing enough to get the full experience of it.
From the first teaser trailers, through the demo, to the end of a too-long singleplayer campaign. Hell, even the name of the company. They literally named their company "Red Barrels." That's like naming your company "gratuitous explosions in a first person shooter." The music is too intense, the action is way too fast, it NEVER takes a break to let you feel something. It's just STRESS, STRESS, STRESS all the way through, from start to finish.
This is not an overall improvement over The Dark Descent! This is just a superficial graphical improvement over The Dark Descent, while the mood and pacing are dragged backward 20 years! Why can nobody see this but me?
I would hate on Outlast more if A Machine For Pigs wasn't somehow even WORSE as a spiritual successor to The Dark Descent. TheChineeseRoom should not be allowed anywhere near a "real game" franchise ever again. If TheChineeseRoom made Super Mario 4, it would consist entirely of running to the right and reading poetry about Princess Peach. You would be able to jump, but all the blocks and enemies would be carefully arranged so that your jumping would never have any effect on them. There would be no bottomless pits and no powerups. Hitting an enemy would result in you instantly respawning on the same screen. TheChineeseRoom would explain that these changes were necessary to prevent idiot players from not having the Super Mario experience that TheChineeseRoom wanted them to have, for example by reading some of the Princess Peach Poetry more than once, or getting "pulled out of" the Mario experience by seeing a black screen telling you how many lives you have left.
WOW, that post got away from me. I respect TheChineeseRoom as artists. But I think I hate and despise them as Game Developers. I want to stop them before they ruin some other IP-- before they make a Portal sequel with no puzzles or a Doom sequel with no shooting. Am I really the only one who feels this way?
If the creator of the game honestly believes that anyone who enters his home without permission deserves to be shot, why did he create a game in which you are forced to enter other peoples' homes and murder their wives? How many wives did he personally murder in real life to protect his own wife? How would that even work?
Any attempt to apply a literal reading of the game mechanics to real-life home defense scenarios falls apart very quickly. Having said that... yeah, from the guy's own comments, he sounds like a paranoid dick. It's like, just buy your wife a taser, man. Lock the doors. If you managed to get a rabid dog inside your house with your pregnant wife in the first place, I am going to go out on a limb and say you didn't think things through ahead of time. Somewhere between "Home Alone death traps" and "a neighbor's dog attacked your wife inside your own home," there's a reasonable level of preparedness. You don't have to choose between "keep all the doors and windows open while you're out of the house" and "shoot everyone who looks at you funny." There's a sane place somewhere between those two extremes. I don't know what to tell you. Maybe ask people from other states? I don't know.
Really? Wow, you must be pretty jaded or something. I read it 4 or 5 years ago when it was still a fan translation and can honestly say that I have never been shocked or horrified by a narrative since. Nothing else has really provoked a visceral response in me in the same way that Song of Saya did. Though more important than its pure extremeness is really the fact that it actually uses the stories horrific elements to contribute to its thematic arc. Both Extra Credits and myself immediately jumped to Saya's visceral elements when describing it, but I think what really sets it apart from other horror stories is that it actually presents cohesive themes and has interesting character growth. Maybe I don't have enough experience with the genre, but from what I've seen, most horror stories are usually too laser focused on the visceral experience of scaring the audience to actually get around to this important second step of actually being good stories.
Try not to get offended when people on the internet don't like something you like.
Well, I wasn't particularly offended by anything, I think "jaded" is a pretty benign descriptor in terms of internet discussion, and I'm pretty sure I explicitly framed my response in terms of my personal opinion, so I'm not sure exactly what I did wrong here.
A somewhat negative opinion had been expressed about something that I thought was quite valuable, so I was just further explaining why I thought it was worthwhile.
@zegota
I was actually wondering about how similar it sounded to 999 when they described that one. Still, a comparison to 999 is enough to get me to try it and see for myself.
http://www.gog.com/game/i_have_no_mouth_and_i_must_scream
@LitleWaffle Agree, I quite liked No One Has To Die. I have no idea how I got there now, just that a source I respected recommended it.
I thought it was just a silly puzzle game at first, and almost walked away, but then with each replay I began to understand what it was they were doing. It's a weird little title with a weird little story, but definitely worth sticking with it to play to the end.
seriously great list but playing a few of these in a row, late at night when everyone else was asleep feaked me out a bit.
Probably 70% of the lists are James's picks. He writes the script. This was probably just the weirdest ones with the Halloween vibe to them that were otherwise considered too weird by the group to include in other lists.
About Pathologic I remember reading on their official forum that they considered remaking the game after Knock-Knock was done. The game is out so maybe we will hear more about a remake (and a proper translation) soon.
It's funny seeing OFF in this video, I know some of the guys who worked on it and was part of the same RPG Maker community for a while. Glad that they get some recognition for this.
You should play it, if you can handle it.
It is honestly one of my favorite stories I've played in years, even if the game style itself is rather old-fashioned. But the thematic elements and the level of fascinating ambiguity, and the role of the player as a character in the game, having YOUR morality questioned-- man, it builds up to one hell of a powerful ending after a damn unsettling game. Not really scary, just... how to put this?
It has a deeper morality than most games with morality systems. And that morality touches the player, not just the character, even though there's only really one track to play the game on. Still, you choose to board that train, don't you?
Also the translation is DAMN good, the music is great, and the game's short enough to not drag IMO, so, you know, a++ would play again. (For like the fourth time.) I definitely recommend checking it out!
Also I'd like to support the idea of VN-themed episodes.
Most are, after all, fan translated.
It is one of the very few games that takes inspiration from Lovecraftian horror and does it RIGHT.
It's a wonderfully twisted and macabre "Lovecraftian lovestory", with themes like dealing with insanity, finding your place in the world and, of course, the way true love does not know any boundaries.
I love how well crafted all the characters are, and I absolutely love the parts where you find out their stories. Who they are, where they came from and how they have been shaped by the world around them. (Especially Saya and Ryoko.)
Also, it has one of the two most beautiful bittersweet ends I've ever seen in any medium.
Called the White End, for reasons I won't explain because spoilers. Just play it and find out. You'll know it when you see it.
(The other game is another visual novel called Kira Kira, just in case anyone's wondering.)