Lotus Prince Let’s Play – Amnesia: the Dark Descent (Parts 10-12)
Lotus Prince Let’s Play – Amnesia: the Dark Descent (Parts 7-9)
Xbox One Reveal Show and Trailer
BT Podcast 55: Suck My XBone
XBOX ONE in 5 seconds
Posted By Austin Yorski about 7 months, 2 weeks ago
BT Podcast 23: The Slowest Snuff Film of All Time,
why are the trees bleeding?!?!
Pokemon and religion. What could go wrong?
Click right here to download the MP3.
Posted By Austin Yorski about 7 months, 2 weeks ago
BT Podcast 23: The Slowest Snuff Film of All Time,
why are the trees bleeding?!?!
Pokemon and religion. What could go wrong?
Click right here to download the MP3.
Music Mondays revisits the band that brought us tunes from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Bit.Trip Runner.
Maybe the most unerotic episode of BTPodcasts history and I loved it. Although Marge Simpson was in playboy.. Johnny’s voice was just wau and Austin’s laugh sounds like Yoda’s.
who the hell would hate Leon’s show because of his voice?!?!?!
Racist monster communists might hate his show because of his voice
a TV series crossover of COD: Modern Warfare –> Fallout –> Sim City
MINDBLOWN 0-0
I think fanfiction is gonna pick that up
about the bathroom and quote from Allah is actually a misconception. It is not to do with the bathroom that is offensive but in the arab world the bathroom is associated with the toilet as in pissing and shiting. Thus they thought COD was associating shit with islam.
Consume thy soul!
Oh God! That voice, that was almost unlistenable, but I stuck it through. i read on twitter that he had laryngitis, but that didn’t register in my mind that it would be here.
Anyways, of course Johnny doesn’t have a soul, he undoubtedly sold his soul on the black market years ago, likely to multiple people, and now needs to collect additional souls to pay off his debt and one for that Xenosaga collection; better start hunting
Hey! It’s Dr. Rockso, the rock & roll clown!
(He does cocaine).
XS3 combat is basically braindead is all. Compare the more elaborate character customization of 1 or the delicious boss battles of 2 and it’s simply outmatched. It’s playable, I played it, but it’s bland. Or we can talk about the ES battles which are terrible.
The third game needs entirely rebuilt because it’s three games mashed into one, with another game omitted entirely, and this fact is screamingly obvious in the final product. You can see the seams. The first disc is a game I enjoyed, despite misgivings about the battle system. But Xenosaga was always a game of mystery, a game building up to something, and the utter botch job of the rest of the story, taking incredibly hard to do reveals and stuffing them into a rushed pile of crap so the story wouldn’t go unfinished does not produce a product that’s worth my time or money a second time around.
It’s not a matter of like or dislike, it’s a matter of amazingly terrible writing. Having your resident fanservice bot house the soul of Mary Magdalene is not good writing. Making her fight another hookerbot comprised of Mary Magdalene’s body with boob-mounted cannons is not good writing. Making Jesus, the actual, historical messiah, a character in your game’s backstory, only to turn around and claim that an original character was the cause of his miracles requires incredible presentation to work. This could be done, you could show that it’s the man proving the worth of men to a divine agent, and get good story out of it. But it’s presented offhand, a plot point they couldn’t let go but neither could they be bothered to present it in a meaningful way. The final reveal is that Wilhelm is the big bad, but actually he’s just trying to reset time because we’re essentially facing down the soul death of the universe. Why? Because the gnosis, as it turns out, are ghosts. Just regular disembodied human souls wandering for eternity. This is destroying the universe because humans are so afraid and distrustful of each other that they refuse to join with others even in death and are starving the collective unconscious. This is an incredible bit of “haha humans SUCK” and it just doesn’t jive. We’re told throughout the game that the heroes possess ‘shining wills’ and this is why they don’t gnosisify. Except we see that Shion also doesn’t, and her ‘will’ boils down to ‘I love Kevn thiiiiiiiiiiis much’. This means that, in order for this to work, we have to believe the vast, vast majority of humans, throughout history, have never loved, never had a goal, never accepted death, never fought for higher purposes, never believed in anything. Xenosaga tries desperately to demonstrate that the future humans of the universe are like that and still fail for the most part! Let alone suggesting all humans throughout history have been like that. Even a fairly dedicated misanthrope would find this pretty hard to swallow.
But here’s what it boils down to. It’s the work of a hack, pressing controversy buttons for their own sake, writing out pitiful teenage angst dreams about how nobody understands. And I’ve played other stuff by these writers. They’re better than that. I feel very, very confident saying they find just as much wrong and stupid about how this story turned out as I do. It’s bad writing and bad execution fusing into a cluster fuck of stupid that derails the two and a half games of promising game before it. It’s not Mass Effect, where the ending missed the point of the series but you could easily write it off and pretend it was all a dream. Xenosaga was a series built around mystery and symbolism, and the end of the story revealed it was all stupid, ham-fisted tripe.
Maybe that’s just me.
Edit: oops, missed the reply button. OH well, obvious what I’m talking about.
I disagree with most what you said; The E.S. battles aren’t terrible, a step up from 2′s, but is still not up to par for the ground combat. Speaking of which, the ground combat is fine, definitely not as deep and rewarding as the first game, but blows the second game’s out of the water. And the Pacing of battle is so much better, battles don’t last upwards 5-15 minutes like in the first game near the end, the third game had much faster battles, yet still managed to avoid being a streamlined mash fest most of the time. The story as well was surprisingly well paced, better then the 1st and 2nd game, and considering how much plot they had to fit into the game, its truly astounding. So much fluff and filler the first two games had are toned down greatly here, and that’s not to say the personality of the games has been removed though.
The Conclusion to the story didn’t seem badly written, or out of nowhere, its hinted multiple times that Chaos and KOSMOS are more then what they seem. Just under the limitations of having four game’s of story in one, it couldn’t have been as good as it original would have been. It’s still not bad though, yeah things needed more time and all, but under the circumstances they did great at fitting all that story in, without it being too clustered with cutscenes. And KOSMOS isn’t really a fanservice bot.
I’ll admit, I judge an RPG’s battle system almost entirely on boss fights. Much as XS2′s system held it back with the 5 minute randoms, it was such a beautiful system when it got to shine. So I can’t hold it in the same light as most of the internet. XS3 meanwhile… again, the ES battles were fine until you get to the boss battles. Like XS2, they lasted upwards of 30 minutes. Unlike XS2, you were just sitting there, spamming the defend command, until FINALLY you could attack and rip off half the boss’s HP at once. Sitting in a boss battle waiting for the boss to let you attack it is not fun gameplay. The ground-based combat is considerably better, and for casual play it’s fine, you have short little battles and get new gear and skills regularly. It can be enjoyable, but in the way a game like Final Fantasy VIII is, you mercilessly stomp thing and that’s kinda fun once in a while. It’s not bad, just lacks a sense of accomplishment or lasting satisfaction.
Plot points being placed in advance isn’t the sole judge of good writing. And it’s not that KOS-MOS’s role in the plot was poorly written, or even badly executed. Her being a technological reincarnation of a protective spirit of humanity makes perfect sense. It’s her identity as Mary Magdalene specifically. Xenosaga bills itself as a game where symbolism, philosophy, and terminology are used with purpose. The alchemical terms used for the URTVs tell you about the characters and their relationships. KOS-MOS being Mary, chaos taking the name Yeshua, those too tell us about these characters, but the symbolism rings hollow. We don’t see these characters fulfilling those roles, or taking character or story role concepts from them. They’re simple labels, because the heart of the symbolism, the relationship between them and the Messiah, their role in the universe, history, and toward humanity, are dumped on the player. There’s no support to sell these concepts and make them real. We’re merely told it is so. And in a story so reliant on symbolism, when you botch the most elaborate use, one that gets at the heart of your theme and message, the whole thing falls apart.
There’s really a lot more wrong with the game than this. But a lot of the other stuff could be fixed so easily, a line here, a redubbing there, could make the intent come through and really focus the game back on what it was doing well. The issue I’ve been talking about though is really at the heart of the game. It has to be done right for the story to come together. And a little line changing can’t do it, you really need to rebuild a big chunk of the story to reconstruct it into something that works.
But like I say, this is just one guy talking about what he’d want to see before spending money on games he already owns and completed years ago. Xenosaga isn’t a series where graphical spit and polish, or little tweaks of modernity, are attractive enough to get another purchase from me. I want what the series could have been.
I feel like my soul just got consumed, but I still enjoyed listening to it, so good choice leaving him in Leon. (What already did it for me was that you could hear Austin thinking “what have I done in a past live to deserve this?”)
I also think there hardly was any episode that was so much about gaming as this one (JK).
This was a tame episode but better luck next time!
Keep bringing the fun stuff!
Never enough souls.
Here is Penn & Teller about PETA http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=inFtOMx8nDU#!. It’s very interesting stuff.
I was on board for the sacrifice of souls to Xenogears remakes until it got tied up with HD Xenosaga ports. Pretty as XS1 might get in HD, the third game really needs rebuilt from the ground up (for starters split into at least two games, also the ending heavily rewritten to not scream “CHAOS IS THE REAL JESUS WE ARE BIBLE FANFIC”) and giving the game a second chance without those things just isn’t worth it.
I always thought 3 had the best combat of the entire series and was just oozing with Xenogears references which brought me great joy. Rebuilt from the ground up makes it sound like it’s unplayable in the current state, instead of just not gelling with what you think it should be.
Also.. demanding the ending was changed cause you don’t like it.. that sounds oddly familiar. Except in this case it is just “cause I don’t like it” instead of it being a crappy rush-job using surprise space-babies… Well… it had space-kids.. but at least they were in the game before the last 5 minutes.