Accursed Farms (Freeman's Mind, Civil Protection, Ross's Game Dungeon)

Ross covers SiN this time.

Edited by M84 on Dec 29th 2020 at 11:30:14 PM

I can really appreciate what the developers were going for with that one. I never played it, possibly because Half-Life was the shit, so the point is made. No awards, though?

Ross talks about what his dream software would be like, namely the ability to extract and isolate 3D maps from games.

Talk about an unexpected present! Freeman's Mind 2: Episode 15

And the trend of modding the game continues. I'm not really happy with this. The conceit of the series is seeing how Ross' interpretation of Gordon Freeman interacts with the Half-Life games, not an alternative interpretation of the games. I don't mind modding the physics puzzles but I do mind modding the actual story.

Also, I think there's another Civil Protection crossover. Poor Mike and Dave, lost in the tunnels.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 30th 2021 at 1:23:03 PM

Well, in fairness, he just modded the bit after the chopper thus far. I don't see any harm in that. The river segment is just way too damn long anyway.

I've played the Black Mesa East section of the game about fifty thousand times and the gas in the airlock doesn't knock Gordon out.

So have I. My point is we don't know if that's a mod or just Ross doing a gag or something. I'd be inclined to believe the latter given it's just the end of the video and he was reaching that timestamp anyway. Either way, it's a bit too early to assume he's made the change. Next video (...whenever that comes out) should make this clearer.

Edited by OdysseusOfGaming on Apr 30th 2021 at 4:41:00 PM

I don't think that was them, it sounded like the All-Knowing Vortigaunt to me.

Still, it's great to see FM back. I've been waiting to see how he reacts to Black Mesa East for a long time, and the last scene really caught me off-guard.

It could be Gordon passing out from lack of food and water. I don't know if G-Man gave him anything to eat while he was stuffed in the basement for 20 years, but he didn't talk about being hungry at the start. Well anyway, this episode answers several long-standing questions I've had about the series.

• How would Gordon handle the chopper battle? He concludes that it teleports in the mines. Is there any canonical support for this idea? It always bugged me, too.
• How would Ross make Gordon deal with the jump off of the dam? Simple: he mods in an alternative path. This is consistent with how he's handled some of the other puzzles in the game, so I don't mind as much. But I would still have loved to see Gordon somehow justify it to himself.

Next episode, whenever that arrives, we'll learn how he deals with the Vortigaunts as allies. He's managed to ignore it so far but it'll get increasingly difficult as the story progresses. Although based on the ending of this episode he might regard Vance's base as some sort of cult operation. He's already told us what he thinks of the Resistance.

Oh, and of course we get a repeat of the Hurricane of Puns about the damn dam.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 30th 2021 at 7:07:02 AM

I knew he would freak out over all the mines. I like the balloon idea.

Making an entire alternate route for the dam must've taken a lot of work. I remember Ross mentioned a while back how he couldn't figure out how to get Gordon over the dam, since he felt the situation wasn't extreme enough to justify him jumping off a ramp several stories into a shallow river.

In hindsight, I should've seen him making a more practical route down coming, given all the mods he's done to the game. Ross has mentioned during the livechats that he believes Half-Life 2 is more "video-gamey" than the first game, in that it forces the player to make more gimmicky or impractical solutions to puzzles that break the immersion for him. Of course, some of these puzzles are justified under Rule of Fun, but Ross has to justify Gordon's thought process during these moments.

In the latest Ross's Game Dungeon, Ross fights himself (literally) as he plays through Echo:

In the latest Ross's Game Dungeon, Ross... er... journeys through a time-traveling adventure as he plays The Journeyman Project.

And I do mean "journeys". This one lasts over an hour. Get some popcorn.

Edited by SonicWind on Aug 24th 2021 at 5:17:38 AM

Ross has another Halloween treat for us this year, this time with a review of Terror TRAX: Track of the Vampire:

Ah, those old games where it was a set of binary choices with no way to tell which would work, so it was trial and error all the way to the end.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 26th 2021 at 6:16:23 AM

Oh hey, I remember this game back when Spoony reviewed it.

...Man, it's been a while.

More Halloween Game Dungeon hijinks ensue! This time, instead of fighting vampires, Ross is experiencing life as a vampire in Gothos.

Gothos. That's the actual name of the game.

...Yeah, this is gonna be a trip.

I've LARPed before, and what Ross said about this game looking like someone's LARP that was filmed against a greenscreen on a cheap camcorder is spot on.

A third Halloween Game Dungeon? Imagine that. Anyway, this time, Ross travels to Mars to uncover a horrible mystery in Martian Gothic: Unification.

...Goddamit. I want to watch this video because the game seemed interesting to me since this video came out but I went through the trouble to actually get the game to play it so I don't want to be spoiled about it.

And it's an hour-long, that much content is usually worth it. Gaaagggh.

[Blanket post]

Edited by XMenMutant22 on Nov 4th 2021 at 9:10:22 AM

New Freeman's Mind!!!!!!1111!!oneone

I haven't even watched it yet. Doing so right now!

Edit: Okay, I see. Very nice.

• Gordon agrees that even he would gas himself under these circumstances. Noble.
• No patience for the "welcome to Black Mesa East" business. He thinks they're all in Lotus Eater Land because they don't understand that they're about to be attacked.
• His interpretation of Alyx's behavior is... actually kind of reasonable under the circumstances.
• He skips part of the gravity gun training sequence — I was wondering how he'd react to Dog's ball, which in the game is advance training for fighting rollermines, but he cut that out.

And now we're on the way to Ravenholm. The next couple of videos are going to be amazing, I'm sure.

Taking a step back, it all kind of makes sense. Half-Life 2 features both Civil Protection and the resistance acting in really stupid ways. The resistance seem to be fighting an utterly hopeless battle and to be catastrophically unaware of how much trouble they are in.

Meanwhile, the Combine can smoke them out whenever they want to but chooses not to until Gordon shows up, but it's all this impersonal machine. The controllers and the CP units don't coordinate at all and the troops have such a weirdly inconsistent grasp of tactics that they can't be all that smart individually.

The whole show is a race to the bottom with Gordon as the Only Sane Man.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 5th 2021 at 2:58:06 PM

Is he going to bitch about everything? I wanted him to at least like the gravity gun and D 0 G but no it's all "Why are you so dumb Alyx".

But Alyx is incredibly blasé for someone whose base is about to be assaulted by the Combine, as if she's oblivious to the danger or just so jaded that she can't be bothered to freak out about it.

Gordon is amazed by the gravity gun but he's also wondering how they have any problems at all if they can manipulate gravity so easily. This is completely reasonable. He also roleplays a kickback to it that isn't in the game, so I wonder if he's going to avoid using it. That would be a nice flip from the game, in which the player is expected to use it as much as possible.

It reminds me of Half-Life, in which he refuses to use the Hivehand and turns down the Tau Cannon the first time he sees it because it blew up and killed people.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 5th 2021 at 3:39:57 PM