Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

I'm a fan of underdog stories, so the idea of characters like Harley Quinn and Deadshot having to find a way to defeat characters like Green Lantern or Superman appeals to me. I am always down for Joe Powerless Nobody vs. the Infinite Omnidestruction Dragon.

Killing them is a bit unnecessarily edgelordy, but I guess that comes with the territory for Suicide Squad. (Though, to be fair, it's a lot harder to nonlethally incapacitate someone than it is to kill them, and when you're already the underdog to begin with....)

But as soon as I heard it was a looter-shooter, I lost all interest.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 21st 2024 at 8:56:24 AM

Yeah, the format ruins any hope of the premise selling itself.

I might even have considered playing a single-player or co-op focused non-live-service game in which you play as actual villains and the heroes aren't brainwashed into being evil just to provide a veneer of deniability to the thing. Who hasn't occasionally wanted to fight Superman or Batman as a boss? The designers could get really creative with them. Well, better ones could.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 21st 2024 at 12:03:31 PM

Yeah the actual execution of battling the League is extremally low-effort in concept.

Like the whole method to defeat Superman is essentially, Luthor invents gold-krytponite, the Squad then duct-tape gold-k shards around them like children creating hideous looks for the characters, and the boss fight is just you shooting Superman with special gold-k blasts to slowly whittle down his health.

Out of all the ways they could have handled this, they picked the most boring way imaginable to take out these characters.

Its pretty much the main issue with the game's concept, they completely botch any attempt at creating a believable narrative that these characters can reasonably defeat the League. Its riddled with so many plot holes and transparent plot armor of the League having the Squad in their grasp and....... just not doing to them.

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 21st 2024 at 9:33:07 AM

You gotta wonder what was going through the Rocksteady devs's heads the moment they heard they had to work on a looter-shooter. I imagine a funeral dirge.

It's like asking Arkane Studios to design a looter shooter.

Edited by M84 on Feb 22nd 2024 at 2:42:32 AM

"Evil Superman" works a lot better when its a wholly original character that can have actual reasons for being evil rather than just taking existing Superman and turning him evil on a dime.

But execs want to have quick guaranteed popularity from the IP so down the grinder the characterization goes. And same for the studio, they think developers are interchangeable cogs in the machine rather than artists with specific expertizes and styles of gameplay.

Still Yahtzee is right, the comicbook industry was the inventor of how to humiliate the characters with the clickbait comicbook like "evil superman", " fat superman", "superman is gay for Jimmy" and "Yandere Lois Lane".

The Lost Art of the Tutorial Level | Semi-Ramblomatic

Right off of the intro, I expect Yahtzee to lionize Half-Life's Hazard Course.

Okay, not so much lionize as discuss the pros and cons of. Which is completely fair. I fully agree with him that the Long Jump Module tutorial in Hazard Course is something you'll probably have forgotten completely by the time you get to Xen and actually have to use it.

So, let's look at the basics:

• Back in the days when games came on cartridges and floppy disks, in-game tutorials were a luxury they couldn't afford, so we had to deal with physical manuals. Some may be nostalgic for those days, and even now there are games with downloadable manuals that one could, hypothetically, print out.
• Tutorial levels such as Hazard Course get most of the training out of the way in one go so the player can jump right into the story, but they do have the aforementioned problem of front-loading.
• Integrated tutorials can break immersion as they stop to teach a supposedly veteran character how to stack boxes or duck, but they are provably the most effective at their job: training the player in a way that they will remember.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 22nd 2024 at 1:25:10 PM

Those game manuals could be a really fun and special addition to the game as well. It often included extra info about the game that wasn't in the game itself, providing more backstory and flavour. I guess that's also covered by in-game bonus material now.

It also often came with maps for early open-world games, which sure was handy in an era where in-game maps were not a thing yet, and posters of the game you could hang on your wall.

I do miss feelies, although they tended to pile up on shelves and in drawers until I unearthed them years later and threw them in the garbage. Regardless, having to glance over at a manual (or the modern equivalent: open the key bindings menu) to figure out how to do something is catastrophic for immersion, and that's the main point being made in this video.

Not all games depend on immersion, and so having tutorial prompts isn't an issue for them.

They could also lead to a wildgrowth of controls. I remember one shooter that had a chart with keybindings, and it utilized the entire keyboard, basically. That's just too much.

I remember games that would ship with keyboard overlays showing you what each button did. It was always "fun" playing them with a flimsy bit of cardboard catching on my fingers and absorbing spills.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 23rd 2024 at 11:13:05 AM

A lot of old RPGs, like NetHack, also did that in the days before the invention of the Context-Sensitive Button. Everything on the keyboard had at least one command, sometimes two (one uppercase and one lowercase). For example, [r] to read a book or scroll, [z] to zap a wand in your inventory or [Z] to zap a spell you've learned from a book, [p] to pay the shopkeeper what you owe him for the items you've picked up from the store, etc.

The learning curve is tricky even if you have a list of all the commands on hand. But the ability to use certain commands on anything (such as [w]ield to equip an item as a weapon, [a]pply to use it as a tool, or even try to [e]at it) causes unexpected results in certain situations. Like, if you've polymorphed into something lithovoric, that gives you the ability to eat any magic ring that's set with a gemstone, and doing so has a chance of permanently giving youself whatever enchantment was on it without needing to use up one of your two ring slots. It's something that, say, a drop-down menu would have turned into an Interface Spoiler, and maybe it's better on average, but there is some charm to being able to go "wait, would this actually work?" and being able to just try it.

I "fondly" remember System Shock 2 and its control scheme resembling an airliner cockpit or the operations panel of a nuclear reactor. Simulation games can get away with that sort of thing, but shooters? Rough.

If there were such a thing as a Nobel Prize for interface design, whoever came up with the idea of the contextual button prompt would deserve it.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2024 at 11:18:36 AM

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden | Fully Ramblomatic

Before even starting to watch this one, I'll bet Yahtzee will make fun of its Word Salad Title. Edit: I am correct, with bonus dry heave. Oh, I see. It's by the Vampyr folks.

You play an established couple coming to a 17th-century New England town to exorcize the ghosts. Then one of them dies, courtesy of the big bad ghost, and the moral dilemma is whether to exorcise or resurrect the party in question. In fact, this is the core decision-making element of the game — one suspiciously reminiscent of Vampyr: once you've finished beating the snot out of angry ghosts, do you give them a nice send-off to their destined afterlife or a brutal one?

Yahtzee has long sneered at moral dilemmas in video games, and this one is no exception, since it doesn't necessarily make sense in the context of any individual case.

Edit: It was pointed out that the title of the game forms the acronym B:GONE. Someone must be very proud of that.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 28th 2024 at 12:43:08 PM

Did Yahtz ever do Mario RPG? Seems like it would be an interesting play for him.

He has played and reviewed quite a few Mario RPGs, although I'm not sure which one you're talking about specifically. Paper Mario is on record as being "his Sonic the Hedgehog", in that he has nostalgia goggles for the one, maybe two good games in the franchise.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 28th 2024 at 1:46:29 PM

Yahtzee will murder children if it means bringing his doggo back to life. Fair enough?

On another note, The Escapist hasn't posted any videos since the last ZP compilation video. I guess that says enough about how the platform is doing.

He's talking about Super Mario RPG, a SNES title developed by Square, recently remade for Switch.

IDK. Maybe it's on his list. Yahtzee alone chooses which games to review.

Heads-up for those interested: According to Nick Calandra, head honcho at Second Wind, Yahtzee's in-development game, Starstruck Vagabond, will be shown at GDC this year.

They've been live-streaming some playtests of it recently on the channel.

Edit: Realized I forgot to include the link to the post.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 4th 2024 at 11:51:51 AM

So how many people here have played one of Yahtzee's games? I'll admit the only one I played was Poacher.

I haven't played any.

I played Hatfall

I tried one of the games he made when he did the "twelve games in twelve months" challenge. It was fine.

Edit: We will likely see a gap in Fully Ramblomatic and Semi Ramblomatic videos for a couple of weeks, since Yahtzee is with the Second Wind crew as we speak filming the fourth season of Adventure Is Nigh.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 6th 2024 at 8:34:09 AM