We’re nearly done. One more chapter, two more screens. I think the final set of puzzles are slightly more difficult than what’s come before, but significantly less annoying - fewer failure states that reset huge amounts of progress, and more of the “figure out the next step and then replay just this one puzzle to implement it” style of puzzle. I expect the final recording session to be shorter than the previous ones, but it might run the same length.
It took this long to do the solo video for this part because I had a hard time doing the puzzles the wrong way, even to demonstrate what happens. The childhood trauma of hauling that rock up the ledges and throwing it over and over if I misclicked anything was too strong, even now that I know I can just save and load mid-level (which is what I did in the previous LP as well). I had to try a few times to get a video that captured the process of solving the puzzles, vaguely, while still being relatively interesting. For reference, my first take was about 18 minutes, and I wasn’t even rushing, really.
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While we’re moving into the final chapter, we left off at the same spot as I did in the original LP back in 2009. For that final video, I put my VirtualDub skills to the test for the first time with an overdub gag. I’ve gotten much better at them in the years since, mostly from learning to use Avisynth, but for a first attempt, I think it was pretty good, and certainly worth preserving even if the rest of the LP wasn’t. So here it is, directly from the source as close as that still exists, to help bridge the gap until the final set of videos for this game.
The final chapter of the game begins, and the stakes are higher than ever! We’re going to follow the demon kidnapper into hell… or “Deathland”, as the game calls it. But first, we need even more magic water.
Part 7-1: “Attack the demon with a projectile Winkle. Can you think of anything scarier than that?” Polsy Youtube
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At last, it’s the end of Gobliins 2! We’ve still got to rescue the Prince one last time, and then escape from Deathland, but we’ve got our wits, a mouse, and a very high tolerance for pain.
Part 7-2: “This level’s going to be the DEATH of me.” Polsy Youtube
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That was a… Very abrupt ending sequence
Just one thing to take care of before I get started on the third game. I don’t think there are any big surprises in this video, but apparently, they added a couple of lines to the CD version, or there was something wrong with the floppy version I got from GOG and the lines just didn’t play. So there’s that to look forward to. After this, we’ll be moving on to Goblins 3, my favorite game in the series.
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Sorry about the delays getting this posted - I’ve been dealing with the strangest health issue yet, which could be anything from “some random neurological disorder” to “I’m not actually diabetic after all and the treatment is destroying me”. The longer description is that my vision is blurry at a distance, just like it was when I got the diabetes diagnosis, but there’s nothing wrong with my eyes that wasn’t wrong before and I aced an eye exam. I took more than a week off work, and while that left me with an abundance of free time, I didn’t know what was safe to look at and lost all sense of time. I even managed to lie horizontal during the day without my muscles randomly twitching, which I didn’t think would ever happen again.
But before all that started, The Splash and I recorded a session of the third Goblins game, which was released in the U.S. by Sierra under the title “Goblin’s Quest 3”, converting the plural into a possessive now that there’s only one character. But don’t worry - we haven’t lost any of the innovation that having multiple characters brought to the previous games, and if anything, the charm has been turned way up. This is my favorite game in the series for many reasons, and I think this video will cover a fair few of them. We do lose a bit of storytelling, but the games have always basically been about solving whatever puzzles are there more than working toward any long-term goal, so there’s not much to be desired there. I’ll be putting the optional story things in the CD version videos, and in this game, I highly recommend that you watch them - the differences between the versions in this game are striking.
Part 1-1: “Even with a coin, there’s no change.” Polsy Youtube
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There is a plot in this game, and it’s about to smack us in the face, then run away before we can see it. Blount lands in the middle of a hostage situation, but he’s got just the tools for handling the situation. Who the hostage is and what connection any of this has to Blount’s quest may be more apparent later in the game. I honestly can’t tell you.
Part 1-2: “Of all things I expect to be a thing, I expect that thing to still be a thing.” Polsy Youtube
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I’m not French, so there might be some cultural nuance I’m missing, but I think the deal with the branch and the pepper is that his head jerked forward when he sneezed, causing him to bonk it on the shield and therefore ricochet into the chasm. This is some seriously weird physics but given what we’ve seen so far it seems to fit in with the rest of the game’s goofball tendencies.
That’s actually sort of explained in this video, in a line that wasn’t in the version I played growing up!
I know nobody’s been watching the solo videos when there are the far more entertaining guest videos to watch, and that makes perfect sense. However, I think you owe it to yourselves to check out at least one portion of the CD version of the third game. The first two only differed in sound design and speech vs. text, but the third actually crammed a few new animations into the story and replaced all of the music with garbage. Not Garbage, the band that makes music, but the auditory equivalent of sticking your head into a trash can. The conversation interface, where every conversation consists of three lines, only one of which has an actual caption, also didn’t work very well with full voice, so they didn’t even try. The solution they came up with is awkward at best. This game is the reason that I wanted to do the dual presentation from the start. There is no way this would have been my favorite game in the series had I known this version existed.
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It took me a few days but I got caught up on this from the beginning. Several times I got irritated with the guest viewers for trying something stupid only for it to turn out to be the right thing to do, and I got stuck on the basketball screen in 2 when I was a kid so I have no room to judge. I’m looking forward to seeing where the third game’s story goes, but surely it can’t beat 1 (I love the evil wizard. Why does he do the things he does? Every narrative should have some mystery left at the end)
I had a bit of a snafu while editing this video, and I lost the entire audio track in an Audacity crash. Fortunately, I’d taken the precaution of exporting my audio before doing any editing (a recent habit), and the audio from the game and The Splash were already separate files, so nothing of value was lost. I still have a lot to learn about making audio listenable, but this should work as well as any of my videos ever do. If anyone has been thinking that I give The Splash more hints than I gave Leavemywife, I think this session will prove otherwise. See if you can guess which words she’ll be eating by the end. (They’re not necessarily in this video.)
Part 2-1: “Finally, something goes the way I was thinking it should go!” Polsy Youtube
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It’s time for our first multi-room puzzle! This game brings back the Gobliins 2 style areas where the puzzles span multiple rooms, but unlike in the previous game, this game does tend to require a fair bit of going back and forth in some cases, even if you know exactly what you need to do. There’s also one puzzle in the game that becomes slightly more difficult if you do things out of order. Guess which order The Splash picked! Or just watch the video and find out.
Part 2-2: “I need to look through these videos and take a tally on how many seesaws have been made or utilized in some way in this series.” Polsy Youtube
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It’s time to wrap up this dragon-memory-restoring note-finding chapter of our journey. Fortunately, we’ve got a bunch of new friends to help us on our way, including a dragon and a mouse. It’s entirely possible that the mouse is the larger of the two.
Part 2-3: “What am I gonna put my ukulele on now?” Polsy Youtube
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Ah, these games take me back…
They were included in Adi, a french series of edutainment software from the 90s, as a reward for doing well at maths tests !
By the way, the reason why the haystack is called a millstone is because they’re both the same word in French: “meule” (there are a few such discrepancies throughout the series)
I suspect there are plenty more instances of that in this version. It always makes me wonder - how can a production studio hand off a script with no context to a translator, who apparently translates each line on its own without asking where it came from, and have nobody match up the translation to the game afterward and say “wait, this doesn’t make sense!” Especially since there have been multiple translations of this game, and the one I had was fairly decent… although it completely changed many of the lines and probably removed a number of meaningful hints.
Anyway, sorry about the long gap between episodes - I’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff over the past month. It’s been a balancing act with things like trying to convince the telework office that I can see well enough to work at home, but not well enough to drive the interstate to get to the office, and a new type of weekly therapy that’s actually helped immeasurably with my depression. I’ve also been extremely tired since about the time my vision went, and I have no idea whether they’re related or not. But I managed to cobble together the next solo episode, and The Splash and I recently recorded the next session of guest videos, so those should be coming along shortly. For now, enjoy Blount’s journey from the land of the dead to the inn of sugar cubes, with a brief stop in the country burned by a dragon.
Somehow I missed that the first solo video was up until now. Whoooooooops.
So I had the CD version back when CD-ROM drives were measured in “Speeds” and I had a 1 speed. It didn’t even have an automated loading tray. Indead you had to put the CD into a case that you’d plug into the computer like a diskette. Thankfully a better idea was developed before long but that’s how I experienced this game. With a clunky, slow-loading disk that presented dialogue that I couldn’t understand because developers at the time thought that text was unneeded since they had voice available and assumed people would be able to -comprehend- what the hell any of the bozos around the office belched into a microphone. To say nothing of accessibility to the hearing impaired. Hoo boy.
I was -extremely- confused as a kid about the whole wolf thing and since I barely understood anything Blount said, I didn’t understand why I saw him get very thoroughly killed and then be just fine in a dark place. I just kind of ran with it 'cause I was like, 8.
Personally I’d call Gob 2 my favorite because I like how Fingus and Winkle are very distinct personalities and that causes one to need to pick up the slack where the other refuses to do the puzzle or just doesn’t have the right idea. By contrast, I don’t really like Blount and I feel they went -way- too Looney Tunes with the tone of the game. I’m probably biased a bit since I had the Diskette version of 2 and could actually -read- what people were saying.
I will say that I do appreciate the next area we’ll be going to after Wynnona’s business is resolved however.
Gob2 has its good points, and I can’t argue with it being anyone’s favorite. I just think the ability for either character to use any inventory item opens things up a bit TOO much, and the search space to find a given solution is huge, especially when you have items like the thumbtack that can be lost and are a pain to replace. Every other game in the series only has one character who can use items, so it’s a bit less tedious to rub everything in your pockets on everything in the environment until something happens.
I have a really good reason this time, I swear. It’s Super Mario Odyssey and Dominion online, a devastating one-two punch to my free time. Meanwhile, The Splash has discovered the science of explosives, and how to lodge herself under a rock. I was probably much more sarcastic this episode than I needed to be, but we talked about that after the session. Hopefully, it’s still entertaining - I think this is one of the best parts of the game, and our banter is probably at its funniest here, when I’m not being playfully hostile.
Part 3-1: “That’s not a doinamoite! THIS is a doinamoite!” Polsy Youtube
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