The offline mutltiplayer calls in NP Cs that are part of the other team that's part of the Forbidden Lands exploration.
Oh, so it's just bots. Got it.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The Games That Drove Me Insane | Semi-Ramblomatic
In this Semi-Ramblomatic, Yahtzee discusses sanity mechanics in games and how they work/don't work — for him. I feel the need to attach this disclaimer every time we talk about his opinions, when it shouldn't be necessary.
Anyway, it comes down to what the Sanity Meter actually does to the player character(s). In many cases it doubles as an extra health or armor bar, so you start dying when you run out of it, or take more damage. In other games it makes the screen go wibbly or makes weird things happen in the corner of your eye, and if you're playing a horror game, one might see this as not actually that much of a problem. "I'm not playing this game to not have hallucinatory gribblies jump out at me!"
By the way, "humanity" and "frenzy" and similar things are just sanity meters in different clothes. But this suggests a proper use for the mechanic: taking control away from the player. After all, when you get scared you stop acting rationally, and the player is always (usually) a rational agent. Making the character do things that the player doesn't/shouldn't want them to do is an effective incentive to keep their sanity up.
Edited by Fighteer on Mar 20th 2025 at 12:41:37 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Sanity mechanics basically provide more of a challenge and incentive to play a certain way. Ie, you can't just bulldoze or run your way through the levels if doing so rapidly increases your fear or something.
When done right, it increases immersion. When done wrong, it's just extra tedium not unlike a bad Escort Mission.
Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2025 at 9:43:38 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
I don't know—I'm inclined to agree with Yahtzee here: while effective at first, once you know what's happening they can easily end up as incentive to play at low sanity. That way you get to see all the cool sanity effects!
... Which seems like kinda the opposite of the (presumed) intention.
I think that I recall his mentioning a case in which sanity loss causes friendly NPCs to appear as hostile ones. That's an idea that I like: it makes you doubt your perception.
I could see more of that being a direction to explore: mix up friendly and hostile appearances and animations; or add new, odd actions—and perhaps even give them real effects, inviting one to wonder whether or not the actions were real. Either way, mess with the player's perception and understanding of the world.
(I think that someone in the comments mentioned DREDGE, which does something similar. However, it was also pointed out there that it's really easy to avoid low sanity in that game.)
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 23rd 2025 at 9:30:39 PM
My Games and Asset PacksAssassin's Creed Shadows | Fully Ramblomatic
So, who's expecting Yahtzee to turn in a positive review on this one? Show of hands? He is totally aware of this too, noting in the intro that even making fun of the lazy subtitling is starting to feel old.
Snark about the miserably prolonged introductory plot notwithstanding, Yahtzee asks the question that many of the... fans may be too strong a word... followers of the franchise have been asking for a decade or more: who plays an Assassin's Creed game to be a brick shithouse beating people up in standard action combat?
Ubisoft clearly set up its two protagonists with their radically different playstyles to accommodate both sets of players: the folks who unironically enjoyed Origins for changing the franchise from a stealth-action RPG to an action RPG, and the folks who paid attention to the "Assassin" part of the title and remember when the series was about dragging people into haystacks for a playful stabbing session.
Once again, I feel the clash between the casual gamer who is perfectly happy with another shipment of "content" as long as it's in a quasi-historical setting and they can distract themselves with simulated murders for a few dozen hours and people who want creatively fulfilling products that bestir some genuine human emotion.
Oh, and no, he doesn't like it. But the reasons he doesn't like it are precisely why most of the people who buy it will like it.
Edited by Fighteer on Mar 26th 2025 at 1:09:13 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I missed a Yahtzee Tries compilation: Wanderstop, Rogue Light Deck Builder, Look Outside, and Schedule 1 | Yahtzee Tries
. Edit: I am watching it as I edit this and will provide updates.
- Wanderstop is a cozy life simulator game by the creator of The Stanley Parable, although if you're expecting another deconstructive satire, you'll be disappointed. It's more about finding your place in the world. You play as a warrior struggling to adapt to a homey life of gardening and tea-making.
- Rogue Light Deck Builder is... well, not exactly what it says on the tin. Rather, it's a... oh, I get it. You're building a deck. As in, out of wood, that people can stand on. So, this is where the subversive parody comes in. The "rogue light" part refers to a light bulb that doesn't like you. I can dig the "custard pie to the face" kind of humor.
- Look Outside is an instruction that is antithetical to the lifestyles of most gamers. Umm... shit. I'll start over. It's a pixel-art horror RPG that wants you not to do what the title says. Gotcha. You're trapped in a room, there's a Lovecraftian horror outside, looking at it kills you. You have to survive for fourteen days on this premise. Yahtzee doesn't think it stands out particularly well in its field.
- Schedule 1 is a "dad game" in early access - an open-world job simulator in which you play as a drug dealer trying to build their own criminal empire. So, the same premise as Breaking Bad, more or less, in primitive 3D and a crappy interface. Yahtzee finds it enjoyable and wishes there were more of it.
However... Split Fiction | Fully Ramblomatic
Recap for the audience: Yahtzee is not a fan of games that demand interaction with other human beings, because with a few exceptions he hates other human beings. That doesn't mean he can't enjoy a multiplayer game in the proper company, which brings us to the offerings of Hazelight Studios: A Way Out, It Takes Two, and now Split Fiction. He disliked the first, liked the second, and now mostly likes the third.
The gameplay is great: lots of mechanics that conveniently take two players to coordinate, enough variety that it doesn't get stale, and the coworker whom he roped in to share the experience with him was more tolerable than the average human being.
Unfortunately, Yahtzee is also into narratives and characters, and neither of those recommend themselves. He speculates that Split Fiction is a commentary on the debate over AI, because the plot is two fiction writers getting hooked up to a corporate thought-milking machine and attempting to destroy it from the inside with the sheer power of their... creativity, I suppose.
The problem is that he doesn't like either of the main characters, which goes back to the first paragraph of this summary. He politely suggests that Hazelight get a professional writer to craft their stories, which is extra-special ironic because of who the main characters are.
But the most immersion-breaking part of the story for him is that, quote, "[T]he power of wealthy tech bros will always be defeated by the power of solidarity, friendship, and young adult fiction." Which, if we think about it, is basically all YA fiction: the idea that resistance to The Man is both possible and accomplished by the efforts of plucky, disaffected young people.
It's also kind of weird that these young-adult fiction writers (one sci-fi and one fantasy, obviously) seem to have nicked all of their own ideas from popular video games, and super off-putting that they spend half their time complimenting each other for their brilliance.
[Reminder: Insert 'This is Yahtzee's opinion, not mine' as a parenthetical to every single sentence.]
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 2nd 2025 at 3:28:47 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Video Game Adaptations Need to Mind Their Manners | Semi-Ramblomatic
As someone who specializes in video games (and novels, I suppose), Yahtzee has been a deliberate stranger to the film landscape for many years. But now he can't help but notice some of these video game adaptations looming on the horizon, like that Minecraft thing, and he's gotten it into his head to discuss why such adaptations are so frequently seen as abominations.
Interesting that he settles on "manners". Like, you wouldn't go into a job interview without doing some basic homework on the company you hope to work for, but so many filmmakers approach these adaptation projects with the air of, "I can't be bothered to play or even understand this thing that I'm making a movie about."
I'll concede that it's totally fair for someone to ask, "Okay, genius, when I adapt Pac-Man, what exactly am I supposed to take from the source material in terms of story and lore?" But as Yahtzee points out, video games have characters, plots, and settings these days, and ignoring them feels like refusal to do one's homework.
Which makes it all the weirder that someone's doing a Minecraft movie. It has no plot by design, so it can only ever act as a marketing gimmick to sell some generic piece of slop to eager kiddies. Which is fair play if it works, I guess, but still rude.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 3rd 2025 at 1:02:23 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"A Minecraft movie could work. Just look at The LEGO Movie. Whether it will is another question.
I've not seen it yet, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but it's so weird to me that the Uncharted movie isn't closer to the games. It's not like 'Action-Adventure works with a wise-cracking protagonist' are out of style. I don't think Holland is bad casting, especially since this is a younger incarnation of Drake, but there are so many actors in Hollywood now who would be even better casting. Nathan Fillion, Chris Pratt, Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg himself. Hell, I know Nolan North's done a fair bit of live-action work, so he'd have been an option if he could handle the action scenes. There's an adventure film coming out by Guy Ritchie called Fountain of Youth and starring John Krasinki, and he seems to be playing a Drake-esque character. What I'm saying is that, whilst I don't hink Holland is a bad choice, there are so many better choices who could still fall under 'Stunt Casting'.
Even if we can get past casting Tom Holland as Nathan Drake, casting Mark Wahlberg as Sully is... well, a clear signal to your audience that faithfulness is not high on your list of concerns for an adaptation. I say that as someone who has neither watched the movie nor played the games but has watched a few Let's Plays.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 3rd 2025 at 1:33:02 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Exactly. That's what I don't get about the Uncharted film. 'Wise-cracking action hero'? That's about half the recognizable faces in Hollywood!
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There has to be an alternative universe where J. k Simmons played Sully.
As a whole, I'm not someone who gets to upset over a lack of fidelity to the source material, it's just weird when you're adapting something that is, itself, aiming to be similar to films. That's why The Last of Us adaptation was so good: it was already practically a playable TV show so the jump to TV was smooth.
Never mind the incestuous chain of film-game adaptations/inspirations that has been occurring over time. Indiana Jones inspired Tomb Raider, which in turn gave us both its own film adaptation plus Uncharted. Then Tomb Raider got rebooted/readapted into a more cinematic gaming experience inspired by both Uncharted and the original movies, and now Uncharted has been adapted to film as a generic action-adventure.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"With Indiana Jones itself being a love letter to older adventure films (and James Bond).
As for the Tomb Raider films, regardless of quality (personally, I think they're a lot of fun), they at least nailed the casting. Jolie is perfectly cast as Lara Croft. Vikander also did very well as the Reboot Lara.
Oh, I love the Jolie films. They're fun and manage to be at least mostly faithful to the core ideas of the original games.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I think it's because video games are generally longer than feature length films. This wouldn't be an issue if the story was limited to cutscenes, which are usually about the length overall of a feature film at most, but any game worth it's salt will develop the story during gameplay as well. This isn't an issue if you're doing a loose adaptation or a new story set in that game universe, but for the most part, series are the only opportunity to fully explore a game's narrative.
Even the actionmoviest videogames have a playtime longer than the whole LOTR trilogy. So even if you adapt specifically them to a movie, you'll have to do a lot of squeezing.
And commonly the adaptations aren't coming from movielike games at all. Or they try to force the movie traits that didn't fit the concept, etc.
Not so coincidentally, some of the more successful ones are based on games with little to no plot or characterization. Just look at the recent Mario movie. Sure, some of the later Mario games have more in-depth plots, but plot still isn't the main appeal of the Mario games.
The traditional side-scroller Mario games also aren't very long.
Edited by M84 on Apr 8th 2025 at 6:12:28 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedWell, the thing that differentiates games from other media is... gameplay. Duh, obviously, but the point is that while players of action shooters are there because they want to rack up hour-long killstreaks, movies and TV shows simply can't do sixty minutes of combat interspersed by five-minute dialogue breaks. They are fundamentally different mediums.
When you boil DOOM down, for example, there might be five minutes of plot in the whole game, found entirely in the text dumps at the end of levels.
Even in series that are very story-heavy, like Half-Life, the gameplay-to-story ratio is something like nine to one. You have to cut most of that out to have a reasonable runtime, never mind that it would bore screen audiences to death. (Also, a Half-Life adaptation would have to give Gordon Freeman speaking lines. I nominate Ross Scott to play him.)
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 8th 2025 at 8:52:41 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Not necessarily. Have a Silent Protagonist in a big budget action film. That would be fun.
Half-Life isn't an action franchise. Well, any FPS is an action franchise by definition, but it is much more story-driven than, say, DOOM, especially once you get to HL2. In many ways it fits the survival horror genre as well.
The point of making a movie (or TV show) adaptation of it would be to emphasize the story and characters, or what else are we doing here? But that's the thing that makes the difference: it has defined characters and story beats already. Any adaptation that doesn't respect those would be a failure in my mind.
And again, why would I want to watch a movie about the game when I can just play the game? It might be enjoyable if a hypothetical film adds to the canon by exploring aspects of lore that we haven't seen before, but if it's a flat retelling of the game(s)? I don't see the point.
Edit: Okay, I'll concede one thing. If the VFX teams can make Vortigaunts look real, I'll consider watching just to see that.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 8th 2025 at 11:05:53 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

My brain is breaking imagining how an offline multiplayer version of the game would work, unless it's LAN-based.
Broadly speaking, persistent-world games need to maintain a connection not just to deliver that shared experience, but to ensure that people aren't cheating.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"