New Video:
Part 4 - Death: Judge Dredd Mall Cop
OK it’s a zombie level set in a mall of all places so lets be honest who’s mind is blown? But what’s interesting is that this level was designed before the Dawn of the Dead remake plagued everything with zombies, back when people remembered that zombies where a jab at commercialism, rather than a gimmicky tool. So prepare yourselves for some of that biting social satire that our lovable scamp Judge Dredd’s known for!
The Judges already are liberal, they accept anyone as a Judge regardless of race, sex, gender, sexuality, etc. if they meet the proper qualifications.
Oh aye but it’s still fun to see him be total garbage to anything with a pulse… or everything in existence really.
Either way the writers of Judge Dredd have made good use of the setting; a blend between a dystopian cyberpunk city sprawl and a post-apocalypse. It allows them to explore both their ideas of the human condition and ideas of societal norms without breaking the tone like other works of fiction have.
New Bonus Video:
Unlocks - Archade Mode, Multiplayer and Cheats
I figured it’d be worth taking a look at some of the unlocks from the campaign along with what the multiplayer was sort of like before it all got shut down.
In this update I take a look at what you unlock through playing the game: Arcade Mode. These are more or less multiplayer maps with time based missions in which you either have to kill a set number of enemies or arrest a set number of enemies. This is can get really repetitive and tiresome when the maps spawning locations don’t really work in your favour, at least you get some cool music and a quick mission to mess around with the different weapons in the game.
Completing these missions with the highest rank (Judge Dredd) then unlocks cheats you can mess around with in the campaign, such infinite health, ammo and law meter, there’s also a variation of big head mode and low gravity ragdolls which makes the physics system even more comical.
I also take a quick look at the multiplayer, playing a game of death-match against some bots. This game type isn’t quite what reviews made it out to be. There’s a lack of game types and the maps aren’t designed in much of an interesting way so every game kinda of feels the same. The rounds last between five and ten minutes and so lack the pacing that the single player offers.
I have tried to set up a server using 3rd party programs to see if it’s different playing against actual people but I’ve had no luck. Since Game Spy ha gone forever i guess we’ll never know what it’s like. Good thing this isn’t a multiplayer only game!
The Special Judicial Squad (SJS) are Internal Affairs. They are the Judges who judge the Judges.
New Video:
Part 5 - Dr. Icarus’ Vampire Factory
About half way through the game and Dredd’s finally decided to do his job and arrest an actual criminal and put an end to the undead threat. Still not fighting death though.
That said the game is starting to pick up the pace for the next few missions, with each level taking between 10 and 15 minutes to complete. It may not sound like much but I think anything more and the game will overstay it’s welcome with how simplistic the mechanics are, there’s only so much you can do with shoot a perp in the wrist then press a button and/or shoot a perp till it rag-dolls.
I’d like to hear more about your Fallout 4 rant.
I second this idea. A good rant can be rather entertaining and informative.
and White_Coke
There’s a stream I did uploaded on Mr. DJBs channel you can find here if you’re looking for something to wet your tongues. I’m more or less covering thing as they come up and come to mind from the beginning of the game; the free form jazz of video game criticism on the internet if you will.
I’ll be the first to admit that I could be a lot more concise and accurate with a planned video, which funnily enough is on the docket. I’ve got the first draft of a script written up which is about 26 pages long, this obviously needs refining. This won’t come too soon though, I’ve got a video on Equilibrium to finish editing, that I shot over a month ago and a follow up video on a director that really doesn’t understand dystopian fiction or subtlety that I should really shoot at some point before I move on to Fallout.
Hopefully I can crack these down and get that all done cause it’s something I really want to dissect and get into.
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New Video:
Part 6 - The Mean Streets of Justice
Oh hey YouTube’s redesigned itself to look more like bland bird shit again. This doesn’t change anything about the LP though.
If this level was in a movie it would be called filler, it would also be called a poorly paced movie. Not much to really say about this level. Dredd kind of runs around the streets, breaking into apartments and shooting everyone who’s different. There’s also a destructible piece of environment and at one point an NPC gets so fed up with it’s own AI it tries killing itself.
Judge Cal (named for Caligula) was a head of the SJS who used his position to become Chief Judge through blackmail and assassination, so the SJS isn’t perfect. It’s a pretty damning indictment of Cal and the Judges in general that he had a picture of Hitler on his desk. Cal also engaged in blatant nepotism when he made his pet goldfish, Judge Fish his Deputy Judge.
Is that maybe what the sentence of “possession of a goldfish without a licence,” is a reference to?
New Video:
We’re about halfway through the campaign and we finally have a boss fight so I think it’ll be a good point to talk about:
Dark Judge Mortis
Judge Mortis is a spoopy ghost person, who’s head looks like a smelly beast skelington and likes to throw smells at the elderly, so they can turn into stinky skelingtons instead of being alive some more…
The comic is actually a bit more nuanced than that. Mortis is an interpretation of pestilence, the first horseman of the apocalypse from the best selling book: The Bible. Pestilence rides a white horse in lore but in Gordon Rennie’s interpretation in Judge Dredd; he’s sort of just there spreading diseases and making things a bit shitter.
Luckily he does even less in this game and kind of just throws toxic clouds in a hospital instantly killing people, as apposed to opening up the opportunity to explore the legalistic of health care in a dystopian environment that’s a farcical mirror of modern day.
For various reasons Dredd had believed himself to be guilty of committing some crime or another, and he willingly complies with the law as long as he believes he’s a criminal. Once he realizes he’s innocent then he becomes willing to fight back against other judges.
New Video:
The whole if this level is one quick boss fight which can be boiled down to hitting 5 switches, while being chased by an immortal being that half hearted stops to throw fire balls in your general direction. Somehow this managed to be the second smartest of the boss fights in the game. This is also the turning point to where the combat boils down to even less, I’m guessing the second half of the game was where Rebellion realised they had overspent or just simply gave up.
Judge Fire:
And yes that is his name
AS the second horseman of the apocalypse he is essentially war - the red horse and so represents and channels conquest. Too bad he only has 5 minutes devoted to him in JDvD.
The Early comics were apparently written in the style of Afterschool Specials, as parodies. But they dropped it because they were apparently to wooden or something.
And everything about this video and your commentary was great. I loved the Skeletor impression
I really find it sad that they didn’t have judge Mortis head into say the central ventilation or environmental control area and flood the area whole building with toxin that way. Boss fight would be trying to shut down or seal off vents to prevent mortis from killing everyone and sealing him inside the system.
Edit: The skeletor jokes and impression were fantastic.
I want a Left 4 Dead style four player co-op where you play as the Dark Judges punishing the living for their crimes.
New Video
Part 9 - Soylent Green is Made of Jpegs
I think I may have gone too far in some places with this video. Also minor gore warnings for this level. It’s more so for the idea of what’s presented in this level, even if the artists did do their best to render human soup in a 2003 video game it can be quite disconcerting.
This level takes place in a “Resyk Centre,” which is essentially where the dead are ground up and possessed until they are edible. It’s basically a way of dealing with a lack of resources in an overly populated city. The subtext of can be construed as a commentary on how dispensable human life is in an overpopulated system, however the more you think about the concepts potential subtext the more it falls apart. Like is it trying to say recycling bad?
You may also recognise this concept from the dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, or what;s more widely recognised, the film adaptation: Soylent Green.
Although it has a very slow pace by today’s standards and certain aspects have aged somewhat poorly, I very much recommend watching Soylent Green if anything for seeing where many dystopian works have drawn inspiration. If not that then in 5 years from now you can turn around to people and brag “I knew this would happen!”
That’s pretty much what the co-op boiled down to. I think the closest thing you’ll find to that these days is when people play cops in GTA online.
See that would at least make this an interesting/ remotely difficult boss fight. This game does have the vibe of being quickly re-built after a server crash. Whether or not this was the developers original plans, you can ask the hypothetical question: As awsome as your idea sounds, did the developers care half as much as you do?