raocow's talkhaus

Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey

Kilgamayan wrote: ↑4 years ago Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey

I always wondered what happened during the Noodle Incident

i still prefer "Juice" as a death reason myself

You can certainly do that in your own tracker, it's funnier than mine :V

THROUGH THE SEEDS AND THE SAND WE CARRY OOOOOOONNNNN *guitar soloing*

huge shoutout to the ivory sewage room

Jeez, Mina, no need to be a sadist about things.

If you insist on being that guy, at least don't delight in your enemy's suffering and expect Robin of all people to play into your revenge fantasies.

Yeah, for as easy as it is to shit on Royal he has kind of been one of Robin's best friends the entire game. <_<

Fantastic thumbnail today.

Agent Black reveals that the majority of her combat experience was gained through excessive playtime in Super Smash Brothers Melee, as evidenced by her tendency to move exclusively through wavedashing.

Cyril wrote: that's not what it means for something to be a spoiler. it works the other way around. knowledge that isn't or hasn't yet been presented to the player is a spoiler.

But it has been revealed, only in a very vague way. At no point is this further discussed.

That, I think, is the conflict we're having here. While Konjak's writing occasionally reveals explicitly what is going on, he relies heavily on pseudo-implicit phrasing, making things sound vaguer than they actually are. He expects you to connect the dots to some degree, except they're not that hard to figure out. One of the big complaints about the writing of this game is that he tends to hammer these points home too hard, enough that it doesn't take much to figure out what the hell is going on and makes the suspension of disbelief harder to attain. Like, consider what has been said and shown in this game prior to my statement:

• The strangely angular plant life
• The appearance of "ancient" seeds that create more realistic flora
• Royal having trouble making said realistic flora
• The futuristic-looking spaceship being called an "ancestral vessel"
• The appearance of "spines" that serve as our fast warp, all of which go into the core of the earth
• The research lab in Darland Ascent revealing much about the purpose of these spines and the controllers they've been using.
• Myron discussing the planet having said spines (his words, not mine) and explicitly stating on some form of artificial intelligence operating it.

After my statement, we have Mina, upon discovering the second "ancestral vessel," explicitly referring to it as the place "humans came from."

But if we have to

go to the moon

just for us to reveal what this all means, then that's ridiculous. It's on the audience for not seeing these very blatant breadcrumbs if they complain of that sort of "spoiler." It requires a complete and willful ignorance to any of the game's plot, which defeats its entire purpose.

Anyway, onto stuff that has been explicitly revealed (I'd been on a brief vacation)...Gustavo pointed out something very important, answering raocow's initial question when discussing the fertility cult that the Isi have: If you're unable to procreate for whatever reason (in Gustavo's case, a genetic disease that gets passed on to the child), you're shunned by the Isi. There's another example this is shown, but I won't say what.

So remember how I was saying I connected the dots to something recently? Turkosa's dialogue post-Tower is what I'm referring to: The Bastion soldier talking to Black at the top of the tower, asking for Grey's ticket, was asking for Turkosa.

Black's fight is fun. The desolate setting, the lead-up dialogue to the fight, Black's moveset...It's all good fun.

Also, Royal is Royal.

I noticed something at the end, during the syringe scene.
Look at Chrome's feet.

They're purple.

He has prosthetic legs.
That's why the syringe didn't effect him.

general chrome is also joker

Been saying since the beginning that Black is the best character~ Jet Black is a wonderful battle theme, too.

And it's not even her best one!

thatguyif wrote: ↑4 years agostuff

The problem with this mindset/approach is that it's one person deciding for other people the proper pace at which the game should be understood and then forcing that pace on those other people whether they want it or not. I honestly don't understand why it is so important that things that have not been explicitly brought up and acknowledged on-camera be not marked as spoilers. It is particularly baffling for two reasons:

1) raoguy is notorious for drawing incomplete or incorrect conclusions from spoilery and spoiler-adjacent info erroneously given to him, and this has sometimes even led to an on-camera plunge in game enjoyment when those conclusions are demonstrated in-game to be faulty. Why anyone would want to inflict this on raoguy or his viewer base is beyond me.
2) Someone else with an "I should be able to post what I think is reasonable and asking me to spoiler-tag myself is horrible and awful" attitude was just recently banned precisely for having this attitude and acting accordingly. Why anyone would want to risk following in that user's footsteps out the door is also beyond me.

I truly, genuinely do not get why you or anyone else in this thread would not simply spoiler mark anything that has not explicitly come up and been acknowledged on-camera that is not, like, a core gameplay mechanic. Please, help me understand - what is so offensive about erring on the side of caution when using the spoiler tag?

I think enemies respawn if you move 2 or 3 screens away? I forget the exact number but I'm sure I remember being able to just leave through a couple screen transitions then come back when I needed an enemy back.

The HP to one stuff is extremely good. Since the gamecspawns enemoes for you to get hrslth frpm you're not in as much danger as you think, and it's a greqt way to show just how powerful Black is.

"You were always arrogant," I say, judging anyone and everyone from this balcony of mine, sneering at anyone younger than myself.

I love that "Pete" here is a perfect micro-tutorial for Her High Holiness Herself.

mother doesn't have tumblr, but she does have a gab account

Polro (Pre-Game) (???)
Agent Grey (Pre-Game) (Juice)
Mrs. Anders (Pre-Game) (Penance)
Henetta (Penance)
Ella (Penance)
Agent White (Seeds)
Gerrie (Fell to his death)
The Silver Watchman (Drowned)
Mother (Seeds)

i'm going to make a "raocow bursts out laughing as a character is killed/dismembered" compilation once this game is done

Well, so much for a loving, caring Mother to watch over her people. The boss fight had some really kickass music though--it's right up there with the music for the Agent Black and Moby Controller fights.

The entire soundtrack is great, but it does spend the game just getting better and better as time goes on. The Tower is about where songs start being consistently amazing for me, and it's still going upward.

For all the chaos and intensity of that fight, my favorite part will forever and always be how Elro just sort of uselessly flops around in the background the whole time.

Kilgamayan wrote: ↑4 years ago I truly, genuinely do not get why you or anyone else in this thread would not simply spoiler mark anything that has not explicitly come up and been acknowledged on-camera that is not, like, a core gameplay mechanic. Please, help me understand - what is so offensive about erring on the side of caution when using the spoiler tag?

Let me ask you a question: If a game brings up something, but it does so in an implicit manner, and it doesn't bother actually explaining what it meant at all for the rest of the game, is discussing that a spoiler? And if so, why are you discounting the fact that it never gets explained?

Because, for a game that has a ton of writing and formatting that brings up important points, very little is explicitly said. A lot of things just never get explained at all in an explicit manner. Were this any other game, I would exercise caution. But in this case, it merits not erring because otherwise there wouldn't be any discussion. That's what I don't understand about your issues with this. You fail to appreciate there's not much in terms of "explicit" points, and we have to grasp at straws here.

I mean, that's the whole problem with being so strict about spoilers. We end up having a dead thread because people get too up in arms about learning any sort of point because Konjak couldn't say something coherent. It makes any sort of discussion extremely difficult to have. Adding spoilers to everything creates a point of friction where people just get discouraged from reading and commenting. Like...we're at 7 pages now, and this game's been going three weeks. The latest SMWCrap.net contest hasn't been going a week, and it's already at 5 pages. It'll likely surpass this thread's post count before this LP is done. And why is that? Because discussion is essentially discouraged in one, overly encouraged in another.

The conflict at heart here is that Konjak isn't a good writer (something that has been noted elsewhere). Part of that is simply he is not a native English speaker. Part of that is he wrote the entire thing without support in Kojima-esque fashion. Part of that is this took him 10 years, and he did it all himself. Part of this is Iconoclasts lays the anvilicious behavior on thick. Konjak really sacrificed worldbuilding for the sake of soapboxing, making what should be explicit very implicit. That greatly undermined any chance of following along with the story.

Like...consider today's video. When it came to explaining what Royal did to earn Mother's wrath, it's actually vague. "You sinned!" "You were arrogant!" "You have doomed us all!" They only once mention something that seemed relevant (summoning the Starworm), and even then it's not explained how he did that or what the consequence of that is other than the end of the world. But when it came to Konjak's opinions on religious leaders, hipsters/gentrified neighborhoods, and mineral extraction, we got that in spades through the dialogue. As a result, the things that matter to most watchers and players gets pushed in the background in favor of what Konjak feels like talking about. That's beyond frustrating.

And I want to make clear something here: I'm not against marking spoilers. You've seen me do it. I'm not that much of a jerkface. Hell, even when the endgame comes and I supply the list of things to do, I'm going to not rely on spoilerrific information (except for maybe one thing, but that is only because it's never spelled out that's where you need to go). But when I bring things up unmarked, it is because the game has said something about them already, or the game never says anything about it.

so, uhm, sorry iconomites, no episodes tonight. mario destroyed me in such a way that I feel like I wouldn't be patient enough with this game tonight, and I'd rather just skip it for today (and today only)

I'm in favor of cancelling the VLDC LP now.

The morbidity of "all the blood in your body erupts from you and instantly solidifies" has already been established, but at least White's death from it was quick. Mother gets to suffer for a good few agonizing minutes as her blood literally curdles inside her.

Also, this game's been doing black comedy for a while, but this might be the single darkest and most comedic moment in the whole thing.