YIIKES! Let's Dunk on YIIK: A Plagiarism RPG

[Timrod]

GrandmaParty posted:
The polar opposite of you is Sephiroth.

The piece of technology you can’t live without is the Juicero.

God. I can’t believe they revamped that intro a third time and it’s still got some serious issues for trans people. There’s two other iterations of it. Jesus.

I’ll be popping in and out to support.

P.s. doesn’t that living room look a little familiar?

The living room… doesn’t look particularly familiar to me, but that’s probably because I didn’t have cable for a long time and didn’t watch a whole lot of TV as a kid - usually my dad had the TV from the minute he got home until the minute he went to bed. Not much has changed there in the past 20 years or so, except now he has a 65-inch plasma TV and a bigger room to hoard his snacks in.

As for trans representation, I honestly wouldn’t trust the writers for this game to handle anything more complex than the one-sentence plot to R-Type 3. I mean, I could totally see how you could do it…but that would require admitting that the late 90s had tons of problems, among them how gay and trans people were treated back then.

Wait. You’re telling me they revamped this intro three times and it’s still this bad? I almost wish Steam had an option to go back in time in terms of patches so I could see how bad it was during the initial release.

I will definitely take your suggestion of Sephiroth for the polar opposite input.

Nidoking posted:
The fountain, and Alex’s shirt, are from Two Brothers, that game that ripped a track from Shadow of the Colossus. I only saw a bit of Two Brothers, and it’s similar to this game in all of the vital thematic respects - it’s based on some great ideas that could make a fascinating game, but instead, they make a pile of garbage.

Oh! That explains a lot. I honestly had no idea what it was. It’s like there’s a monument to plagiarism sitting prominently in the intro of a game with plagiarism issues.

Chowder posted:
Oh, and the technology you feel the most connected to is Flexplay. Look it up, it’s fun.

I watched a Youtube video on that a few weeks ago. As much as I’d like to use the Juicero, the company that made Flexplay (Flexplay Technologies) was founded in 1999. That’s too good to pass up.

Tolvo posted:
Oh yeah I should mention, I was unsure if it was a joke but the water fountain if I remember right is of characters from a previous game they made. I remember hearing that though I don’t really know much about this studio other than this game in particular. It’s still weird to me how much the main character looks like Chuck C Johnson.

I had no idea who Chuck C Johnson was before you pointed it out, but yeah there is definitely an uncanny resemblance. Interestingly, I looked to see if Two Brothers was on Steam… and it looks like the developer took it down from the store. I would go track down a pirate copy, only people have said that it has some severe crashing issues with displays bigger than 1920x1080. My monitor is a 2560x1080 ultrawide, so even if I can find a copy, I don’t think it would run.

[Timrod]

I went back to re-record the first part of the LP, with everyone’s suggestions, and I noticed something.

: Excuse the shift in image size. I had to bring the game down to a window because otherwise, stuff got cut off and it caused all kinds of graphical glitches. Anyway, you’ll notice that after pressing a button to bring up the load menu, there’s a little tiny thing in the corner that says “References”. I didn’t even notice this when I went to record for the first update, but I looked back at my screenshots and it was in fact there.

: They must’ve patched this in at some point between May and now, but the game now has a bibliography that sounds like it was written by someone who was incredibly bitter about having their plagiarism discovered. I looked back on Steam to see if the developers had said anything about adding this, and as far as I know they did not and have not.

: Also, what the shit is up with that guy in the speedo? Is this their way of saying “I’m genuinely mad that someone would dare to discover the fact that I plagiarized large portions of Haruki Murakami’s work?”

: GrandmaParty, you crafty dog! I didn’t know it had a response for stuff like this, but it doesn’t surprise me. I bet it also has one for if you put in the default names for Earthbound, but I didn’t feel like going back and testing that theory.

: I wound up messing up a couple of the names, so Jorts got moved to a different one, “nerdiest person” got renamed to Hifumi (keeping the Danganronpa reference) and for “friend who is always there” I put Depression.

: So, this time I figured I’d actually try and explore the town, since the first attempt I kind of just ran into the cat without knowing it was there.

: The house next door to Douchenozzle’s has a chest hidden behind some trees. This is sort of the equivalent to the secret clubhouse in Earthbound, but I’m not going to call this a direct Earthbound reference.

: The Camo Jacket has better stats all around than Douchenozzle’s default equipment, so I made sure to equip that.

: South of that is a basketball court, where Douchenozzle can pick up a basketball extremely awkwardly and not throw it - the best he can do is just drop it.

: Next to the court is a house with… a rope bridge leading to some boxes. The game kind of insinuates that we’re going to have Pokemon-style HMs at some point, which would actually be more like Anachronox, but whatever. We can’t get this stuff yet.

: On the way to look for more crap to pick up, I tried to get Douchenozzle hit by a car. The game’s uh… amazing car pathfinding caused this car to simply crash into a tree and sit there even once I left. Great job there, game.

: Behind Douchenozzle’s house are a bunch of mystery rocks we can’t do anything with yet.

: If we jump off the side though, there’s a nonsensical hole in the… log palisade that is perfectly normal for a suburban home… that leads to another chest.

: There’s also two trash cans with money inside - this one and one other.

: This will give us enough to pay off that moron with the zine stand. I’m going to do that because I have a feeling it’s going to end up like that merchant in Final Fantasy 10 where he has better items later on depending on how much you gave him in the earlygame.

: The “zine sticker” is a key item.

: Last, I went upstairs in Douchenozzle’s house. Lots of quality stock photography that does not at all clash with the low-polycount models, no sir.

: This is Douchenozzle’s room.

: …What. You… you said you got the record for it in a bargain bin! That’s completely contradictory to… you know what, fuck it. Not even going to think about it.

: Gotta love those posters on his walls that I bet the texture artist ripped from Deviantart.

: Blatant advertising! Also, this isn’t very accurate - most consumer-grade CRTs that size only had enough room for one composite input at a time.

: I then went to look at Douchenozzle’s parents room, and this is where I managed to somehow softlock the game. I tried to examine this cabinet to see if there were items inside. There aren’t, but when I reloaded the game I came back in here and there’s $20 in the right-side nightstand.

: This is what pops up - this is the shelf in Douchenozzle’s room. Something tells me that unless that black belt is in competitive whining, it’s not real. Also, why is this popping up here?

: Anyway, let’s go grab the letter and…

: Wait, what the fuck?

: Maybe I tried hitting something wrong. Let’s get RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT and try again.

: Yep. The game would do this every time I interacted with ANYTHING, including save points.

: Past the cat from last update is a little spot with some healing items in it. The game will drown us in them going up to the first dungeon, but there are a ton of spots where you can just get free healing so they’re kinda useless.

: Here’s the other half of Frankton, which we saw in the intro. There’s… no grocery store here, and most of these places are selling stuff we can’t afford.

: This town has a surprising number of people hanging out by dumpsters, including these two NPCs.

: Yikes! Or more accurately, Yiikes! There’s more healing items in chests to the right of where these two NPCs are.

: We can also find our first water fountain here. Water fountains are heal points that restore all of your HP/MP. The park sign is a reference to some bullshit with the dev, I don’t know exactly what.

: We do get a slight lead from this guy, offering to sell us drugs in the park at night.

: There’s also this old lady who clearly forgot that HMOs had been around since the 1970s.

: We can also try the record store, which has a record with… all of one better attack stat… for a whopping $75. People on the Steam forums have said you want to buy these because the yellow/red zones get bigger, allowing you to get more hits in.

: We’ll have that kind of money by the end of the first dungeon, which is coming up.

: There’s a pawn shop that sells a hat we can afford, so I bought it. It’s an extra 2 defense over not having it.

: Just outside are… more people hanging around near a dumpster. I don’t remember doing this at all in 1999. There’s chests out behind the pawn shop, but we can’t get them.

: I got into a second random battle on purpose to show this off. Every time an enemy attacks, we get to use the “defense gauge”. Hitting the yellow-ish area cuts damage in half, while hitting the thin red area dodges it completely.

: This is what’s in that abandoned building where the cat ran off to.

: Welcome to what the game simply refers to as “The Factory Hotel”.

: That little purple gremlin thing is a random encounter. Occasionally, they’ll spawn out of nowhere and will… kinda chase after you ineffectively.

: In the back are three trash cans with healing items, some money, and a collectible pog.

: This is the weird lady we saw in the establishing shot. God dammit, of course she’s blue.

: I should mention that this entire area has music is that is suspiciously similar to Earthbound’s… I’m not sure what the name of the track is, but it’s the one that plays in the zombie lair underneath Threed.

: Oh, and of course she disappears when we talk to her.

: There’s two chests with weird blue hooded people (Earthbound Reference Counter: 4, 5 if you count the hamburger we found in one of the trash cans) who disappear when we go near them. They both have healing items, but this one has an Ambrosia, which is this game’s version of an elixir.

: We could try to go in through the front door, but it’s locked.

: Instead, we want to go to the right, and cross the boards to reach the ladder. Stepping in the purple shit makes you take a single point of damage every few frames.

: Any time Sir Doucheington touches a ladder, we get a cutscene of him climbing it. This does not at all get extremely annoying in say… about ten minutes.

: The cat knows how to use an elevator. Why am I not surprised?

: “I scanned the dark floor and found nothing.”

: “I sighed as the elevator began to shake, vibrating with motion.”

: “The elevator came to a smooth, but unexpected stop.”

: So wait, did he press a button, or did it move by itself? If he did, why? The cat can’t push buttons.

: “Please don’t die, please don’t die…”

: “I pleaded with the mechanical gods to keep the power on. My prayers weren’t answered.”

: Welcome to the first dungeon! There’s a trash can with… you guessed it, a healing item and some cash in it… to the right.

: The circuit breaker doesn’t do anything, and to the north is a puzzle we can’t solve.

: Next to that is a locked door with a monster in front of it. I figured this was going to be a boss, but…

: Nope, it’s just one of those smile things and a rat. Rats have about twice the HP smiles do, but that’s about the only difference between them. I figured out here that the highest combo you can get on this record is 11 - four hits on the first yellow section, one more on the thin one, hitting the red for +1 combo and resetting the record, then doing it all over again. Unfortunately you can only hit the red spot once - the record will end automatically once you hit that spot if you’ve hit it once before.

: It took me a minute to find this side area. It’s located just south of the circuit breaker, but you can’t see it unless you’re going along the bottom edge of the screen. This is required to progress. The sign will inform us that we can hold Enter to speed up combat, but you still have to hit all the meters.

: The random encounter was just another rat, and the key is just leaning against one of the like, twenty or so clones of this same shelf we’ll see throughout this dungeon. I like how they didn’t even bother making them slightly different.

: I feel like all of these healing items are kind of an insult, given that there has been a water fountain in every single room we’ve been in so far.

: He’s a black belt in complaining loudly!

: … what. Anyway, this thing has way too much dialogue, so I’m going to cut it down to the salient points.

: So yeah, we now have our first… the game calls it a tool, so why not. There’s a voiceover for this and the panda’s voice is both godawful and highly annoying. They also voice the “PRESS L TO SUMMON ME” part only they use “Circle Button” in the VO. Since there’s no re-bindable controls on PC, this is just pure laziness.

: The trash can in this room brings us up to over $60. The blue dresser also has some MP restoration items in it. Why there’s a dresser with a Game Boy on it in an abandoned building, I have no idea.

: Finally, the desk has an accessory that boosts luck by 1 point. I think the only thing this effects is how often you crit.

: The northern room has a pyramid in it. The eyes are supposed to follow you, but uh… that left one looks like it’s a little broken. Can you solve this stupid puzzle?

: The panda, by the way, has a really confusing UI element. It has an arrow that extends outward, making it seem like you can place it anywhere along that arrow, but really it just always drops in front of you.

Next time, we’ll go through that door and witness our first instance of the game plagiarizing.

[Chowder]

Oh man. Putting a citation for written language in your bibliography of “references.” The salt. I’m gonna get a swimming pool and keep a pet octopus with all this salt.

[GrandmaParty]

1. The living room is a more or less exact copy of the Full House living room, complete with Joey alcove;

2. The first iteration of “What’s your name” was “What was the name your parents gave you?” Second iteration was “What is your real name?” This is the third iteration.

And it’s still bad. Eesh.

[AmewTheFox]

I"m supposing that the “tools” bit is supposed to be referencing Wild ARMs, except implemented poorly because I’m pretty sure you never move around as anyone but Alex YIIKman.

But “the elevator began to shake, vibrating with motion” is the perfect example of how pointlessly prose-heavy this game gets.

[Timrod]

: Beyond that door is… what looks like the Internet as illustrated by one of those early 90s cyberpunk games that were all just copying off Neuromancer and Snow Crash.

: To our immediate left is another switch puzzle. One thing I hadn’t really thought of up until I started writing this out is that we still have no real idea what Alex’s entire motivation is as a character.

: We have no real idea what it is that possessed him to go into an abandoned building after a cat for… a grocery list he probably could’ve gotten by, I dunno, calling his mom?

: To get some perspective, we’re now about… I’d say a good 30 minutes into the game - maybe a bit more because I’m going into this blind and without a guide. Now, let’s look back at the list briefly while I do this stupid puzzle and talk a little bit about where we’d be if we were playing some of the games on YIIK’s bibliography for about the same period of time.

: Well, by this point in Earthbound, we’d have already met Buzz Buzz (unless you spend a ton of time grinding for some reason) and figured out the whole overarching plot with Giygas. In Mother 3, I think you’d still be playing as Flint but at least you’d know what Flint’s deal is.

: This part’s a bit weird because you have to drop the panda onto it from above. Anyway: Final Fantasy 7, you’d have blown up the Mako reactor and at least known a little about what’s going on. Chrono Trigger, you’re probably done with the Millennial Fair (unless, like me, you grinded for that sword) and you’re already on your way to the past.

: The thing is, in every single one of these situations, we’d have already hit the plot hook and either discovered our character’s motivation or be well on the way to figuring it out - even if it’s something like Chrono Trigger where your character’s motivation is “Well shit I got sent to the past time to beat up some Saibamen.”

: Hell, even Ni no Kuni 2 had established Evan’s motivation by this point - we’d probably already be clear of Ding Dong Dell and heading to the old lady’s house.

: My point is, there’s a scene in The Room where Tommy Wiseau’s mother (the one whose entire character is defined by definitely having breast cancer) is talking to Lisa and asking about Denny, his adopted son. She asks Lisa something like “What does Denny do?” and Lisa responds with a story about how Tommy Wiseau’s character adopted him and how great their relationship is and how Denny really looks up to Tommy Wiseau and pretty much everything you could say about Denny without answering the goddamn question.

: I will always, always remember the Rifftrax for The Room because at that moment, someone chimes in with “And that’s what Denny does.”

: This game is a lot like that. It’s like we’ve asked the developers the question of “What’s Alex’s character motivation? What is it that drives him?” and the devs have answered “Well, Alex is home from college… and then there’s an abandoned factory with an eye-pyramid and a glowing lady who changes colors and plagiarizes Haruki Murakami and…”

: And that’s what Alex does.

: I’d post the full dialogue here, but you can probably read it yourself in one of Haruki Murakami’s books.

: Wait a goddamn second! This… this sounds like plagiarism! And not the kind of plagiarism we already know about!

: It IS plagiarism! In fact, it sounds like… they [Need] a [Citation]. Now, is it possible they covered this with the citation for Webster’s dictionary?

: No, because that term isn’t even IN Webster’s! Also, shout out to “nosegay”.

: Plagiarism Woman blasts off into space, presumably to find more Wikipedia articles to “borrow”. By the way, I also took the liberty of searching to see if anyone caught that - and apparently they didn’t. I did, however, find an interview with the developer from Kotaku, dated May 20th, 2019 that talks about the plagiarism issue.

In it, they state:

“The idea is, Alex has read After Dark, and his fondness for the novel is seeping into his reality with vocal and physical manifestations calling his attention back to the passages of the book now living in his subconscious.”

: Only one problem there, chief. After Dark was published in 2004! Not only is this plagiarism, they didn’t even have a good reason to want to use it in the first place! I wonder if they’d try to bullshit the same explanation with the Wikipedia article, given that Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1999.

: We can then use the door near her (right behind where the panda is in the last pic) to reach the top of the eye-pyramid.

: Oh look, now we’re in the End of Time from Chrono Trigger. I mean, it’s not plagiarism, but it’s not original either. In fact, I don’t think this game has a single original thought anywhere in it.

: Most of All of the NPCs in this area are pointless. There’s a couple of trash cans with our favorite number - healing items and money - in them, and also a treasure chest kinda hidden to the south-west of where we start.

: Well, we just saved ourselves $75, if nothing else. The Sergeant Salty EP is only marginally better than our current weapon, boosting our attack by one but dropping our luck by one.

: As you can see in this fight with a new enemy, the Skull, the new weapon has the exact same attack pattern as the old one. Skulls are basically Rats with twice the HP.

: There’s also a couple of chests up high, where we can’t get them. I tried to find a way to get them, but I don’t think there is one. This implies that we’re probably supposed to come back later.

: There are two windows at ground level - this one you can see in the corner, and a second one on the other side of the map. I went through both just to make absolutely sure I’d found everything, but they both lead to the same place.

: We could go back through the red window, but what happens is that you wind up in a pointless side area with nothing in it but warps that lead you back here. Yes, I tested every single one.

: There’s a chest here, but it has a combination lock. Supposedly, according to the dev, this is something you’re supposed to do either later or on a second run.

: “Oh, great. Another person.”

: Meet Sammy, whose name we somehow know despite having not talked to her yet. She’s… well, remember in the first post when I said that the game references a high-profile suicide? Yeah. Sammy is heavily based off Elisa Lam, a college student who committed suicide in 2013.

Douchenozzle, ready to get his /r/incel pickup artist moves on.

: “No! Please stay! I’ve been pretty lonely here.”

: Said no one ever to Douchenozzle or the author he’s a blatant self-insert of.

: “Where is here, anyway?”

: “I was hoping you’d know. I’ve been lost down here forever.”

: I swear, if this entire thing with the weird shit in the factory is a metaphor for depression…

: “Did you come through the elevator too?”

: Now, I’m not going to accuse them of plagiarism here, mostly because I went through an SSLP of Persona 4 while working on this update to verify that this was the case, but this entire scene seemed really similar to the scene in Persona 4 where you first meet Teddie in the TV world. The main difference is that Teddie has an actual personality.

: “–I asked, thinking it sounded nicer than ‘Who the hell doesn’t know what an elevator is?’”

: “I came from here. Is there anywhere else? Anyway, I’ve been looking for my cat, Dali. Have you seen her?”

: Completely un-necessary walls of text in this scene alone: 1

: “Is that the cat that looks like Salvador Dali?”

: “[scoff] I don’t know who that is. My cat just looks like Dali - herself - not another cat named Salvador!”

The [scoff] is not something I added in, by the way.

: This guy is like the fucking Tim Buckley of video games. We fucking get it! She has an uncanny lack of knowledge about basically everything!

: Completely un-necessary walls of text in this scene alone: 2

: “I told her I wouldn’t mind helping her find her cat. I told her we should move quickly and get out of this dank basement.”

: “I waited for a moment as she processed what I said. She was a very difficult girl to read, especially without being able to see her face.”

: “I could tell something was wrong. She really projected her opinions and feelings into the room, even without saying them.”

: IT’S CALLED BODY LANGUAGE YOU FUCKWIT! AAAAAAAAARRGGGHHHHH!

: Completely un-necessary walls of text in this scene alone: 3

: You know that scene at the end of Hotline Miami 1 where you’re fighting the ninja in the Russian mob boss’s room and you just sit there and slam her head against the floor? And then she starts crawling away from you, and you get right back on top of her and just keep slamming her head against the floor? That’s what the writer is doing right now.

: “It’s not that. It’s okay. Forget it.”

: “Hey now, that’s lame. You can tell me anything. No judgment here.”

: … What. What the fuck?

: I wonder if this is like, some kind of natural defense mechanism in the human brain when you get approached by ol’ Fuckface here. You just kinda shut down and act like a complete dumbass and hope he goes away.

: “Hey, I’m serious. I didn’t mean anything by that.”

: “It’s not you. That wasn’t fair of me. It’s just that the world has used me so unkindly, I fear it’s made me suspicious of everyone.”

: I like how this almost completely contradicts the part about her being so naive that she has a cat named after a person she’s never heard of.

: I will spare you from the… seven remaining text boxes, including the one where Fuckface makes a joke about the n-word after Sammy calls him a ginger.

: Haha no I won’t. Did you really think I was going to suffer through that alone?

: Completely unnecessary walls of text in this scene alone: 4, though really that last one should count for like 3 by itself.

: Sammy then joins the party, which proves that the stat system in this game is a goddamn lie. Notice that her strength stat is 2, which is half of Alex’s. This will become important in just a bit.

: As soon as we talk to Sammy, we wind up… wherever this is. This room is one of those Lost Woods style trick rooms.

: Going through a door brings us to the same room, only this one has the Eye of Providence on the wall.

: Opening a door will then cause the eye to open slightly. If we were to go through the door now, we’d wind up back here with the eye totally closed again.

: Instead, we want to open the door on the other side as well, causing the eye to fully open, then investigate the eye.

: Who the fuck was that? The cat’s right there, though.

: Before we go to the cat, there’s four boxes “hidden” by the eye. You can see the corners of them when the camera pans out after looking at the eye. The two on the right have $40 each in them (bringing us well over $100) and the two on the left have a healing item and a gold bracelet, which raises maximum HP by 7. For reference, Alex has 10HP, and Sammy has 8.

: Honestly, this should read “Dali is a tool, much like you are.” I’ll show off what Dali does in a minute, but if you’ve played Paper Mario, Dali is the koopa party member.

: “Okay, so shall we get out of here?”

: “Sorry about the house, I’ve been meaning to get someone in here to fix the power, but who has time for that?”

: “I get so busy that little things like that get away from me. But that’s normal isn’t it? You get used to the flaws in your home. It’s always confusing for guests.”

: “Like my mother used to have everyone take their shoes off in the kitchen. Who does that? Oh no… I’ve become my mother.”

: The last time I got warned about Wilhelm in a game was Borderlands 2. God, Borderlands 2 was a pile of garbage. “Oh no, it’s Wilhelm! He almost killed off the most annoying character in the game!” and then he dies in like three hits.

: Dali works by hitting switches and opening chests that are too far away to grab. Unfortunately, using Dali SUCKS. The aiming for Dali snaps to the cardinal directions, meaning you have to finagle Fuckface into just the right position to get it to work.

: The game then puts us into a dumb switch puzzle where we have to use Dali to hit switches remotely. Hitting that switch on the northern island SUCKS because you can’t stand right across from it. Nintendo figured this shit out in 2000, but clearly the dipshits who made this game couldn’t.

: The left island switch raises and lowers the left and middle platforms, while the northern island switch sends the middle one…

: Into this position to make a bridge.

: A fight with two skulls! Let’s show off Sammy’s attack. She has two spells, both of which are heals and will not be useful.

: Sammy uses a worse-looking version of the hammer action command from Paper Mario. On the PC, “pulling back” means holding S or the down arrow. Holding too long causes an automatic miss.

: I took a detour to the north to get the chest, which you can actually do with Dali without fighting the monster. It has equipment meant for Sammy in it, but… it’d be better not to give it to her. I mean, it’d be kinda creepy giving someone you just met a T-shirt that’s an advertisement for your crappy pseudo-Gameboy game with a plagiarized soundtrack.

: Now, this is how I figured out the stats are a lie. This is that first battle with the two skulls. The one on the right I had Alex hit with a 9-hit combo. It did about 75% of the skull’s HP in damage.

: This is the fight in front of the chest.

: Sammy attacks by throwing Dali at the enemy…

: And kills a full-health skull in a single hit, despite having lower stats than Alex does.

: Two switches later (one to get the platform over and a second, at that lever on the bottom of the screen, to move it the rest of the way) we’re… back in the factory?

: Oh, there’s the elevator. Surely, nothing bad could possibly happen to the female character who is based on an actual person who was last seen in an elevator shortly before committing suicide. This, by the way, is EXACTLY why I didn’t put the gold bracelet on Sammy, despite the devs pretty clearly intending you to do that.

: On either side of the elevator are couches that contain 50 cents each. Alf Warbucks strikes it rich again! This game is (definitely not) better than Vegas.

: “Well, at least we found Dali. Imagine how much worse it would have been without her?”

: “Right. So where do you live? I’ll walk you back home, or maybe I can borrow my mom’s car and drive you if it’s outside of Frankton.”

: “What do you mean? This is my home. This is where I live.”

: Yep, nothing bad could possibly happen. This is absolutely nothing like the last minutes of Elisa Lam’s life. Not at all.

: “What? You live in this shithole?”

: “That’s not very nice.”

: I think what they were trying to go for here is that moment in Silent Hill 3 where the guy goes “They look like monsters to you?”

: I mean, technically his house is the set of Full House, and that had Bob Saget on it… god dammit, I said Bob Saget and now I’m going to hear Gilbert Gottfried in my head all night.

: “Sorry. It’s just not every day I meet a girl who lives in an old factory.”

: “I don’t see it that way. I almost feel as if the factory lives with me. As if the factory, just like Dali, is a part of me.”

: Metal Gear?!

: “Of course the factory isn’t part of me. That’s just weird!”

: “But do you actually live here?”

: “Yeah. Just me and Dali. But usually, Dali is better about keeping me company, ya know? He isn’t always just running off to God-knows-where.”

: There is an 11-box monologue here, not counting this one.

: “A mysterious girl, who lived with her cat in an old steel mill. It was obvious to me that her words didn’t contain the entire truth.”

: “Something about her compelled me. Pieces of her story started to fit together in my mind.”

: “Well, at least that’s what I had thought at the time. I can admit now that some pieces were pure fabrication on my part.”

: Okay, so now I think I understand. This IS a Final Fantasy 10-style “how we got here” story, only instead of “we”, it’s a single dumbfuck. They could’ve made this more clear like, I dunno, the first three times he monologues like this?

: “In my head, her story went like this: Sammy was homeless. A runaway woman who was trying to escape hard times - someone who had found refuge in her cat, maybe the only thing left from her previous life.”

: “Somehow, this felt right inside my head, but I could still tell I was missing something.”

: “Is what my hobby?”

: “Staring off into space and screwing your face up as if to say ‘What’s going on inside my head is REALLY important so just let me think.’”

: Now I’m just confused. Is the monologue from the future, or not?! Make up your fucking mind!

: In case you’re wondering what’s going on here, Sammy questioned Alex’s entire character and now she has to die for it. I’m actually playing this game completely blind minus a couple of things I know in advance - one being that Sammy dies here. My theory, however, is that anyone smarter than Alex will die.

: I’m not sure if the cutscene director forgot that she was bleeding profusely from her eyes or not, but whatever.

: What I love about this scene is that Alex doesn’t even TRY to help her. He sits there staring like an idiot until after she’s already outside the elevator, then just kind of weakly puts his arm out. If this was a better game, I would almost think this was an attempt at realism - showing that the protagonist doesn’t have action hero reflexes. Here though, it almost looks like he’s just trying to make himself not look like an asshole.

: “Sammy was gone for good, swept away as if she’d never been there at all.”

: “A door into nothing, into a different reality, showed up and swallowed Sammy whole.”

: He is trying WAY too hard to be Max Payne right now.

: “All I could do was replay the scene of her being pulled into obscurity by nothing. There one second and gone the next.”

: And there’s another one of those “vibrating with motion” moments we know and hate. Also, I like how he manages to repeat himself three times in that one monologue just using slightly different words.

: We’re now back on the first floor of the actual factory. There are vending machines here for reasons unknown - all they sell are basic healing items and there’s a save point just outside.

: Amazing! Plagiarism Woman managed to go four whole lines (I cut two out) without plagiarizing! A new record!

: As soon as we leave the factory, guess what? ANOTHER MONOLOGUE!

: Now, at this point you’re probably asking “Hey Timrod, why would you not use the icons you made to lower the general size of this update?” The answer is because I want you to know how it feels to sit there for a good minute (and yes, this takes a full minute and then some) and just listen to fuckface here very slowly read out his fucking inane bullshit. You can’t skip any of this in-game, there’s no way to fast-forward it.

: Before we leave, there’s a chest here with $40 in it I missed on the way in.

Next update, we’ll attempt to go buy drugs in the park, get a couple of chests we couldn’t get before, and hope to god Alex shuts the fuck up (he won’t).

[Tolvo]

Oh that’s right, now I remember why so many people I saw sharing the terrible shit of this game stopped. Many of them had hard locks of the game in the factory that prevented all progress. I remember some even replayed a few times and it happened every time.

[RJWaters2]

This is the type of smile I wear while enjoying this LP

[Combat_Lobster]

You actually won’t be returning to this part of the factory ever again, and the only way to get those chests is to use Panda to physics a ladder on the upper platform where the windows are to get to them. There’s supposed to be a puzzle that you can do to reach it normally, but it’s completely broken and has been broken since version 1.01. (They’re suppose to fix it so people can unlock the super secret third ending that’s totally in game for realz.) Anyways, here’s how you can get to the chests.

[Timrod]

I was going to do a quick mailbag update, but then… god dammit.

Oh man. Putting a citation for written language in your bibliography of “references.” The salt. I’m gonna get a swimming pool and keep a pet octopus with all this salt.

I think the best part about it is, they don’t even seem angry that they plagiarized or that they plagiarized for reasons that make about as much sense as Quiet’s outfit in MGS5, but they only seemed mad that they got caught doing it.

1. The living room is a more or less exact copy of the Full House living room, complete with Joey alcove;
2. The first iteration of “What’s your name” was “What was the name your parents gave you?” Second iteration was “What is your real name?” This is the third iteration.

And it’s still bad. Eesh.

God dammit! You know, the first time I read this I thought “How hard is it just to ask what your name is” and then I saw what we’re going to see at the end of the mailbag update and you know what, I’m surprised the developer of this game is even able to breathe on their own.

I"m supposing that the “tools” bit is supposed to be referencing Wild ARMs, except implemented poorly because I’m pretty sure you never move around as anyone but Alex YIIKman.

But “the elevator began to shake, vibrating with motion” is the perfect example of how pointlessly prose-heavy this game gets.

I have never played Wild Arms, but I probably should given that I have a PSP Go sitting not even four feet from me right now.

Oh that’s right, now I remember why so many people I saw sharing the terrible shit of this game stopped. Many of them had hard locks of the game in the factory that prevented all progress. I remember some even replayed a few times and it happened every time.

Why am I not surprised? I think it might be related to some kind of memory leak, because I know after getting to that part past the flying carpet/switch puzzle, I kept having a shot of that room flash every time I went into a new room. It was the kind of thing that’s too fast to get in a screenshot.

You actually won’t be returning to this part of the factory ever again, and the only way to get those chests is to use Panda to physics a ladder on the upper platform where the windows are to get to them. There’s supposed to be a puzzle that you can do to reach it normally, but it’s completely broken and has been broken since version 1.01. (They’re suppose to fix it so people can unlock the super secret third ending that’s totally in game for realz.) Anyways, here’s how you can get to the chests.

Excuse me for a minute. Here’s my immediate response to that.

Thank you for letting me know. You know, I thought I was done with bullshit puzzles when I finished Gabriel Knight 3. Clearly, I was wrong. Even though there’s been a video posted, let’s just turn this into a mini-update because I’m going to go experience this bullshit myself. Seriously, why would you break the puzzle and then not just… I dunno, remove it entirely until you could update it?

There’s one thing I want to know though. The combination lock chest. If you don’t come back to the factory, how the hell do you get that open? The dev said on the Steam forum there’s a trading sequence involved, but I swear I looked all over the town and didn’t find anything.

: So let’s talk about this obvious glitch we’re using to fuck with this puzzle. The video that Combat_Lobster posted makes this look easy. It is not.

: Now, if you’re wondering how you get to this area (and I had figured this part out before I posted the last update), if you go through the red window before talking to Sammy…

: You get shunted into this area, with a bunch of teleport windows. I actually tried all of these - most of them just warp you back to Sammy’s room, while one at the end warps you to where we entered the area from.

: I think two of the windows lead to the same place, but I know this one works so let’s use it.

: In theory, what you do is mash L to summon and unsummon the panda while also mashing the arrow keys to cause the physics to kick in and move the ladder. The problem is that when it gets near the window back there (which I’m assuming was the intended way to get up there) it becomes very hard to hit. That’s fine though, a few more hits and…

: God dammit! Fuck! Shit!

: Okay, what the fuck, where’d the ladder go?

: FUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKK! By the way, if this happens to you, there’s no way to reset the ladder, so you have to start from scratch.

: My second attempt was a little more successful, until…

: The ladder got stuck against the wall. Thankfully, it only took me another… two and a half minutes out of the probably 10 I spent fucking with this stupid ladder to finish the puzzle.

: The Propeller Beanie is the only worthwhile item in any of these chests - boosting Alex’s defense a full 3 points beyond what the paper bag gives us. The garbage can has money in it, and the other chests have an Ambrosia…

: And an item that is a straight downgrade to our Camo Jacket. Why it gives us two of them, I have no idea.

Anyway, finishing the mailbag…

RJWaters2 said:
This is the type of smile I wear while enjoying this LP

So here’s what I want you to do for me, RJ. Go make a Tabletop Simulator game based on this stupid ladder puzzle. I want people to suffer.

[Combat_Lobster]

There’s one thing I want to know though. The combination lock chest. If you don’t come back to the factory, how the hell do you get that open? The dev said on the Steam forum there’s a trading sequence involved, but I swear I looked all over the town and didn’t find anything.

Allegedly, it’s something you can open in NG+, but… like everything else in this game, it’s broken. Now it’s being re-purposed(?) for the super secret third ending that’s totally in the game for realz ™.

[Tolvo]

I’m starting to think this might be a bad game that’s only worth is found in irony and communal suffering. I’m just spit-balling but what if?

[RadicalEddie]

Bless you for your bravery in wading through this bullshit. God knows I couldn’t handle it.

[Chowder]

Yeah, of course he’s mad he got caught. It’s not like you copy another author’s work that perfectly by accident.

He absolutely just said to himself “none of the fucking plebs who are actually going to play this game have even heard of Haruki Murakami, so they’re never going to notice that I’m not actually this intelligent or deep.”

Side note: I’ve never read Haruki Murakami but maybe I should. Probably be more thought-provoking than this game.

[Timrod]

I hope you’re all ready for like thirty straight minutes of monologue interspersed with jump scares I couldn’t capture, because I sure wasn’t!

: The first thing I did was go check the park for the drug guy. He uh… he sells nothing good.

: The game wants us to bring Fuckhead right back home, but there’s something else we can do first. Because we have Dali, we can get these chests now.

: The items inside are pretty useless. One of them is the “running shoes” accessory which is more or less a straight downgrade from the gold bracelet, and the other is a “smelling salts”, this game’s revive item. They weren’t even selling those in 1999, you dipshit!

: You know it’s going to be good when we bring Fuckface home and the first thing we get is a “REFLECT” prompt. Monologue incoming!

: We already know that! I just played as you going to the goddamn couch!

: “My mother, a forty-nine year old, short, red-headed woman was an Information Systems Programmer Analyst for Pacific Chime, the West Coast’s leading telecommunications provider.”

: “Her job, ironically located on the East Coast, worked her harder in one year than most jobs work people in a decade. This job paid well.”

: “Without it, my sister and I never would’ve gotten through college. I left school debt-free thanks to the back-breaking mental labor of my mother.”

: That has the be the most awkward goddamn sentence I’ve ever heard. By the way, I looked up to find out where the developer is from, because usually if something sucks this bad, my home state of Connecticut is involved.

: I couldn’t find out where they’re from, but I did find out that the dev studio consists of three people, all of whom are related.

: Immediately after Fuckface’s monologue, his computer plays a copyright-friendly version of the old AOL “You’ve got mail!” sound. This despite the fact that he clearly uses dialup, meaning either he’s racking up those charges or his computer is possessed.

: Once we get near the computer, the screen goes dark purple like this for a second and you can see a shadowy figure in the alcove. I’m assuming that’s the ghost of John Stamos’s career. It’s supposed to be a jump scare, and there’s actually a second one coming up that I couldn’t capture. Why they needed jump scares, I have no goddamn idea.

The computer is a cutscene for right now, but later we can try and use it and it’s… bad. You can hear dialup modem noises when he logs in.

: I’m not entirely sure what the hell kind of email this is supposed to be. I didn’t have an email address for another… probably two years or so when I got a hotmail address in middle school, but I’m fairly certain browser-based email never looked like this.

: You know what I love in a game? When the main character goes on back-to-back monologues with no gameplay in between, and the dialog doesn’t auto-scroll so I can’t just leave the game running and come back in an hour.

: “Last thing he sent me that was allegedly scary turned out to be a picture of two elephants locked in the throes of passion.”

: “I sighed and clicked the link. The file was 2.9 megabytes.”

: “In the dark room the monitor was hurting my eyes. I rubbed them and waited for the file to load.”

: I can think of about four different ways to write that last sentence so it doesn’t sound as awkward as Alex looks. “The brightness from the monitor against the darkness of the room stung my eyes.”

: Alex’s VA corpses here and giggles at “cartoon porn”. I don’t know why. The line isn’t funny. Nothing about this game is funny.

: “Maybe a girl from my high school was now into adult videos and was doing some particularly unladylike things.”

: Again, awkward fucking sentence. The “joke” has nothing to do with the plot and is basically “HAHA WOMEN ARE PORN STARS”. I want to punch this dipshit.

: “While the video loaded, I thought of all the girls I had gone to school with who might be involved in such activities. All of the girls that came to mind neither (sic) had the looks, nor the motivation to seek out an adult filmmaker.”

: Alex is like a fucking alien or something. Who talks like that? Can anyone prove that David Cage didn’t work on this game?

: “I gave up. I’d just have to wait for it to finish downloading.”

: Now, here’s something the developers could’ve done, and it would’ve been historically accurate to boot. Pacific Bell got bought out by Southwestern Bell Corp (SBC) in 1997, and dropped the Pacific Bell name entirely that year. SBC owned a number of phone companies on the East coast at that time.

: At the same time, SBC had started offering DSL packages in… guess when… 1999! Just imagine if this had been reduced to maybe two lines. “I’m glad my mom got this new DSL thing through work. I hated that stupid dialup noise.” and then the image just fucking loads in like 30 seconds.

: I also love how the developers were afraid to namedrop Pacific Bell, but weren’t afraid to namedrop QuickTime, which is still under active development by Apple.

: “Finally, it was loaded.”

: So wait… you needed to load a 2.9MB video… but this is a BBS post.

: One thing you’ll notice is that Alex isn’t in any of these photos. That’s… curious. Also, these “photos” are basically taken straight from actual photos of Elisa Lam right before she died.

: I feel like they just kinda stole this entire thing from Persona 4.

: I looked it up, and they didn’t even get that right. The New York Times (article might be paywalled) did an article in October of 1999 that stated the average college cost for a private college (with room and board) was $21,339 a year. Hundreds of thousands would be appropriate today, but in 1999 you’d probably have to be going to an Ivy League with zero scholarships. Not that I doubt that’s what Alex did because he’s a complete moron.

: “It’s already 2:00 PM. Don’t you think you should be getting out of bed?”

: “Just… can you keep it down, please? I had a rough night. I can’t get that video out of my head.”

: I like how he’s totally forgotten that he saw someone die in front of him.

: “Alex, can I ask you a serious question?”

: “Do you have to? It’s too early for serious questions.”

: Also, I kind of wish the writers had set rules in place for what’s actually happening and what’s either Alex doing an unreliable narrator thing or just being generally fucking insane. No one else in town, for instance, comments on the presence of monsters or any of the weird RPG shit. This feels like the fucking Quiet Man where he wasn’t even deaf or something? Fucked if I know.

: “I don’t let you get away with letting things slide.”

: Like, what I’m trying to understand is this: is the panda actually “alive”, or is it just Alex fucking hallucinating? It kind of doesn’t make sense for the panda to have woken him up if it’s not actually alive, but Sammy referred to it explicitly as a stuffed panda.

: “Okay, fine. What is it then?”

: The thing is, the panda has a voice, but it’s run through a filter that makes it difficult for me to tell if it’s Alex’s VA or not. This whole thing is so fucking dumb! Like, for Earthbound it would make sense because the characters in Earthbound are kids. Alex is over 20 and talking to a stuffed animal like it’s fucking Ted, except taking itself seriously.

: “I-if you had seen her being pulled out of the elevator, you’d have known she was gone for good too. And besides, it’s-”

: “You’re forgetting that I was there. I saw it too. And I get it. You were scared, right? So you ran home. I understand.”

: “Yeah, maybe.”

: “Now get yourself out of bed, take a shower. You smell TERRIBLE!”

: Shout-outs to the fact that they didn’t bother to remove the model from the bed, so there’s two Alexes.

: “Why had I run away? Why did I just stand there and let her get pulled into – into what?”

: I also realized just now that Alex is absolutely going for the Travis Touchdown look, so of course they wouldn’t bother having him change clothes. That actually would’ve been a nice touch. I also just remembered that Travis Touchdown has a YIIK shirt in Travis Strikes Again.

: “What exactly HAD she been pulled into? Just the thought of going back to the factory made my stomach tighten.”

: “But if I didn’t go back, I knew I’d never be able to live with myself. I think there was a part of me that didn’t believe what my eyes had seen, that I was missing something - some vital piece of information that slipped my mind and the whole thing could be explained logically.”

: Oh, THERE’S David Cage! He’s the one in the blue hood.

: This is a very long, very awkward cutscene, and as much as I WANT to skip it, I need to show this entire thing off. I also ran each and every one of these lines to check for plagiarism - they were awkward enough that I thought they might be plagiarized, but they’re not.

: And I get the feeling this is a bad mockery of the English language.

: There’s a jump scare right about here where you see Sammy covered in blood, but I couldn’t cap it. Don’t worry though, I re-created it 1:1 using advanced Photoshop techniques that I learned from watching the Retsupurae playthrough of Arise.

(Photo Credit: Google. No really, it’s the thumbnail that comes up when you search “John McCain”. I have no idea where the hell they got it from, but my guess would be the U.S. Government)

: Yeah, well I gradually come to sense that this fucking script is broken in more ways than one! Fuck this cutscene!

: Thank god that’s over. It’s not like there’s going to be another set of pointless dialogue…

: “Now, with a new sense of bravery, you’re running off to the last location you saw her to try and track her down.”

: FUUUUUUUUCKKKKK

: “Exactly!”

: “I think you have the wrong number.”

: Okay, so NOW we can go to actual gameplay… right?

: Nope! No gameplay for you! Just cutscene!

: Meet Michael, or as I like to call him, White Urkel.

: Really? Do we REALLY need a goddamn monologue for this?

: “He was a good kid, a bit younger than me, and usually worth a laugh or two. My hand covered my eyes to block the sunlight so I could see him better.”

: “I thought back to the last time I had seen him. For some reason, I couldn’t place any memories of him since before high school. But, I knew I must have seen him since then.”

: “It makes you into something.”

: Now, I’m PRETTY sure that the people voiceacting Alex and White Urkel here are the brothers that make up Ackk Games. I’m too lazy to look it up.

: “What’ve you been up to?”

: “Just took the SATs. That’s about it.”

: Michael is also a walking fucking time paradox, as we’re about to find out. Alex says that he’s “a bit” younger than he is. Now, I don’t know that it was this way in 1999, but most high school students take the SAT in junior year, which puts Michael at 15-16 years old. Alex has just finished college, but he admits he didn’t do it in four years.

Let’s assume that Alex, like me, entered college at 18. He does four years, putting him at 22, maybe even 23 depending on how many extra semesters he took (I’d assume he’s 23). This would mean that Michael is either 6 or 7 years younger than Alex is. I dunno if I’d call that “a bit younger”, given that they never would’ve been in the same school together.

: “Sounds intense. How do you think you did?”

: “I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. But then I realized how uncomfortable it was to sit at the edge of my seat, so I sat normally.”

: “Just a little joke. Anyway, you look good. Well, maybe a few pounds heavier. Guessing you didn’t major in Exercise Science.”

: “Great! What do you do with that?”

: [groaning noises]

: “Have any fun plans for the summer?”

: “Not really. Just got back yesterday. I already spent the day chasing a cat and exploring that old factory by the water tower…”

: “Oh wow, that sounds awesome. Hey, have you ever heard of Urban Exploration? There is this great website called www. onism1999. com. I think you’d get a kick out of it.”

: The voiceactor, who again, I presume is one of the developers, actually fucking spells the URL out, including the “www” part. It hurts. A lot. I also purposely broke the link to that site because it’s a promo site for the game and fuck giving the developers attention.

: “It’s like a conspiracy theory support group. People from all over the world post about political conspiracies, local myths, stuff like that.”

: They wanted a stand-in for either 4chan or Reddit, despite the fact that 4chan would not exist for another four years and Reddit for another two after that.

: “You don’t look so good, dude. Everything okay?”

: “It’s something with that page. It’s been screwing with my brain.”

: “What exactly did you see on there that has you so freaked out?”

: “It- I don’t know if you saw it or not. It was the one with the girl in the elevator. The one who gets lifted off the ground.”

: “That – that was supposed to be filmed locally.”

: The writer is overusing dashes and I hate them for it.

: “After that went up, everyone on the forum started acting strange, like a sort of darkness had come over the website.”

: What the shit kind of line is that? Who fucking talks like that?

: “It was the first time something like that has been posted and people weren’t immediately calling it a fake.”

: I’m not going to repost it because it’s already in this update, but if you scroll up to where Alex used his computer, you can see that there WERE people calling it fake.

: “Something about the look of horror in her face. There is a sick part of people that WANT it to be real, ya know?”

: So, just a refresher, and I’d know because I did parts of this update twice. From the time Sammy got kidnapped to now, roughly 35 minutes have passed. Probably a good… 33 of those are cutscenes and monologues.

: “But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. There was something that felt personal, almost intimate, about my meeting with Sammy.”

: “Like in that moment of her disappearance, we were linked, that it was for my eyes only. Her memory was for my thoughts only.”

: Yeah, nothing at all creepy about what you just said. Nothing at all. Carry on.

: “But I needed someone to talk to about the situation, so I proceeded with caution.”

: “I know that sounds weird, but I really think that video was filmed there.”

: “What?! Really? Y–You want to go?”

: “I was getting my camera repaired, if we go in I’m going to want to take pictures. Photos would be like GOLD on ONISM.”

: “Yeah sure, let’s just go quick.”

: “That building isn’t going anywhere, anyway. Besides, the whole thing is probably a hoax. I checked the paper this morning and there wasn’t a mention of a missing Frankton girl.”

: Michael is similar stats-wise to Sammy, only his strength is… somehow higher than hers was.

: I tossed one of the Slightly Used Jersies and a Paper Bag on him for now. We could buy another Propeller Beanie for him, but those are like $20 a piece. Surely, we can get to gameplay NOW, right?

: Nevermind the fact that we passed this arcade at least three times so far.

: “That’s AWESOME. WOW! How long has this been here?”

: “They opened it about three weeks ago. I still haven’t gone in. I’ve been waiting until they fixed my camera so I could get some great photos of the place.”

: I don’t really understand why he’d want to take photos in an arcade. Most people aren’t there to have their pictures taken. I also don’t understand why someone would open a standalone arcade in a small town in 1999. The only arcade I remember from that time period was attached to a mini-golf place next to the gym I go to. The mini-golf place closed down like ten years ago, and has been abandoned with zero bids on the land since. The owners have rented it out to a car dealership to park their cars in, and there’s a group of trashy old people who do a “classic car show” every Friday during the warmer months.

: “I hear they have a bunch of import games.”

: “Import games? From where?”

: Gee, I dunno, France? SNK’s totally from France, right? Same with Sega?

: “I dunno. Japan, mostly.”

: “Aren’t like, all games made in Japan?”

: “Well, at least the good ones are. Although, there are some good RTS’s on PC I’ve been playing lately, and I’m pretty sure those are made in the US.”

: I love how they omitted an “an” in this sentence. It makes me think Alex is a caveman. Now, let’s see the worst part of this goddamn conversation. I want to post images for these so I can tear them the fuck apart.

: Okay, so let’s tear this apart. We know that Michael is around 16 years old. Let’s look at release dates for each of these games:

Chrono Trigger: 08/22/1995
Lufia 2: Even Gamefaqs doesn’t know this one, they cite it as August 1996.
Secret of Mana: Gamefaqs doesn’t have an exact date, October 1993.

August 1996 was LESS THAN THREE YEARS AGO. Keep in mind it’s April 4, 1999. Yet, the way Michael talks about it, it’s like it’s 2010. Also, from personal experience, none of the kids I knew who had a SNES owned any of those games. In fact, I can tell you that the one kid I knew who did own an RPG (and it was Super Mario RPG) found it boring as hell. My first RPG was Final Fantasy 7, and even then only because a friend’s older brother had it.

Further, I did some digging and found a copy of a game magazine dated September 1996. It’s a “top 100 games of all time” issue. You will not find a single mention of Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana in it. Nor will you find a single mention of Lufia 2, despite that being a new game at the time. Their top game, by the way? Mario 64, which had come out that year.

Next, I found out that Gamefaqs actually kept lists of which games were most popular on their site each year going back to 1998. Let’s take a look, shall we? The one I linked is for 1999. You’ll notice that Chrono Trigger is on the list… in 51st place. Lufia 2 and Secret of Mana are nowhere to be found. Why is this? Because of emulation, which was still in its infancy at that time. That’s why Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana is on the list, despite the fact that it had not seen a US release and wouldn’t for another 20 years. In fact, you don’t see Chrono Trigger get on any top games lists until like, the early 2000s when everyone had played it on an emulator.

The fact is, this would work if the game took place in 2004 onward. It doesn’t work in 1999, when I guarantee you almost no one in the US, let alone a kid who was 13 years old and probably didn’t have the money to be buying his own games, had heard of Chrono Trigger.

Anyway, that’s enough of that shit.

: Nope! Fuck you, you don’t get any free advertising in my goddamn LP! Eat shit! No one ever will who didn’t back it on Kickstarter, because you’re a plagiarizing motherfucker who stole a track from Shadow of the fucking Colossus and had to take it off Steam!

: “I just want to step in and smell that combination of bacon grease and BO.”

: I’m… reasonably certain I’m going to start screaming when they enter the arcade, so let’s go to the camera shop first.

: I looked it up, and digital cameras have existed for a long time, going well past 1999. However, no serious photographer would probably have used them because they were notoriously crap (from what I remember at least) up until the mid-2000s.

: Mercifully, the arcade is not a giant cutscene or another monologue. Oh no, that’ll wait until… the start of next update.

: The only reason the game has us come here is to meet this person, who we don’t actually meet yet. I think I only realized it just now, but this game kind of totally rips off Stranger Things, and this lady here is YIIK’s equivalent to… I think her name is Eleven? The bald psychic girl. I only watched half a season of that show.

: I’m going to skip almost all of this. It’s short anyway and basically consists of Michael going “HEY LOOK AT THAT GIRL OVER THERE”. We can pick that dollar on the floor up though.

: Onward! So we can maybe see some actual gameplay after 40 minutes of almost solid cutscenes out of 90 minutes of game time!

: Unlike the last time we were here, the window on the second floor is boarded up. The front door, however, is open.

: I intentionally got into a random battle here just to show off Michael’s attack.

: It’s basically Parrakarry’s attack from Paper Mario 64 - you push the right button at the right time to increment the combo counter.

: Meet the “Soul Survivor”, which is absolutely not a Starman from Earthbound. Totally different.

: “The entire galaxy - no, the universe maybe - compressed into the silhouette of one entity.”

: “It hadn’t noticed us at first. We were as insignificant to him as the trillions of stars at its core.”

: “But, when provoked, it came after us like the most sought-after thing in the universe.”

: “I’ve been scared before. Everyone has. But those past memories of fright were nothing compared to what we had just experienced.”

: “As if a black hole incarnate had come to exist, and it wanted us gone. As if consuming us was its only purpose.”

: “I couldn’t say why I felt that way at the time, but I had known it was true. And with all this in mind, Sammy’s vanishing was starting to feel like the least supernatural thing I would experience.”

: Time for our first bossfight! Oh boy! Gameplay!

: It’s really hard to get screenshots of the battle text in this game, because it goes by so quickly. I think what happened is that when reviewers complained that battles were too slow, the developers reacted by speeding up the text rather than, I dunno, getting rid of some of the minigames.

: Our attacks do NOTHING against the boss - he just automatically blocks them. Now, because of a bug that was apparently introduced when they fucked with the battle text, there’s a hint that’s SUPPOSED to show up that doesn’t. What’s supposed to happen is that Michael calls out and says there’s no way to beat it and you should run.

: Instead, I kept going, assuming the boss would eventually become vulnerable, or I’d just die and it was one of those fights you weren’t meant to win. Eventually, I missed a dodge and Michael died in one hit.

: One turn later, Alex took a hit for 15 damage, which is just below his max HP thanks to the gold bracelet I equipped on him.

: I let Alex die, thinking “Okay, it’s been… five or six turns. There’s no way you’re supposed to win this.”

: By the way, this boss has a theme with lyrics. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on Youtube and I refuse to give the developers money for it. I’ll uh… I’ll just make a video myself. The soundtrack is maybe the one thing about this game that doesn’t suck. Toby Fox actually made a track for it. This track, however, is the most emo garbage I’ve heard since I was in high school.

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYG2szV0b18 - Here’s a video of the fight I made, where I also show off both Alex and Michael’s regular attacks and special attacks in action.

: The trick is to run, which requires… another minigame. In this minigame, L is the jump button and you’re attempting to run away from the boss without hitting obstacles.

: We immediately book it to the elevator, with the boss in pursuit.

Next time, we’ll see more pointless monologues, more pointless dialogues, and maybe some gameplay if we’re lucky.

[Chowder]

God, this game is just nothing. We’ve spent most of our time in cutscenes and I have no idea why Alex is doing anything, even just in the immediate sense of reacting to the world around him. I don’t understand what I’m looking at, I have no desire to engage with it, I don’t even really want to talk about it. Sometimes the game says something that reminds me of something I want to talk about (I have a weird story about Chrono Trigger if anyone cares to hear it) but nothing I’m looking at right now gives me anything to sink my teeth into.

[Nidoking]

Alex’s voice is Chris “Kirbopher” Niosi, who’s done a lot of voices for games, TV, and anime. There are also some troubling accusations against him including sexual abuse, so… consummate YIIK, really.

[Timrod]

God, this game is just nothing. We’ve spent most of our time in cutscenes and I have no idea why Alex is doing anything, even just in the immediate sense of reacting to the world around him. I don’t understand what I’m looking at, I have no desire to engage with it, I don’t even really want to talk about it. Sometimes the game says something that reminds me of something I want to talk about (I have a weird story about Chrono Trigger if anyone cares to hear it) but nothing I’m looking at right now gives me anything to sink my teeth into.

Honestly, when I did that last update, I was going to take out some of the pointless text. If you think about it, most of the monologues/dialogues in that segment of the game are just repeating the same shit we already know. I think the best analysis of the plot I’ve seen so far was a person on 4chan who said something along the lines of “It feels like the writer was trying to write the Great American Novel and forgot they were writing a game.”

But yeah, go ahead with your Chrono Trigger story because chances are it’s going to be more interesting than the game.

Alex’s voice is Chris “Kirbopher” Niosi, who’s done a lot of voices for games, TV, and anime. There are also some troubling accusations against him including sexual abuse, so… consummate YIIK, really.

I’ve never heard of him, but I am not surprised even in the slightest.

[Tolvo]

I have known for years people who have associated with Kirbopher. I’m not sure that posting the callout here would be good but uh, seems like a very abusive dude. Works on Mob Psycho 100’s English Dub, OK KO on Cartoon Network, A Hat in Time, Skullgirls, and more anime and Cartoon Network shows. There’s, kind of a worrying trend of this with voice actors for games, cartoons, and such.

[Chowder]

Once, when I still had the time and energy to try to find work as an animator, a friend working on a particular production looked at my reel and said, “They hired Chris Niosi, he animates like whales tap dance, you’re a shoo-in.” I didn’t get the job. That stung, and moreso now that what kind of person he is has come out. Many of his victims are friends-of-friends so my twitter feed has no shortage of evidence that you shouldn’t touch him with a 39 1/2 foot pole.

Anyway, Chrono Trigger. I remember as a kid seeing the TV commercial for Chrono Trigger and thinking it looked absolutely boss. No clue what it was about but that shot of the giant frog stomping on the battlefield looked kickass. So I asked my parents for it, because when Chrono Trigger was new enough to be running TV ads I was like eight years old.

Now, I presume what came next came because my parents let on to the clerk that they were buying the game for an attention-deficit eight-year-old whose taste was so bad he liked the Ace Ventura sequel. I presume that he told them “This is a long, complicated RPG. Your hyperactive little plebian is going to spend like ten minutes with this, get bored, and never touch it again. Make an excuse and set him down in front of Mario World.” Because my parents told me that the reason they elected not to buy me Chrono Trigger…was that it was an extremely rare collector’s item valued at a whopping seventy United States dollars. I think my main takeaway from this excuse was that the game was simply not actually available, I understood the concept of scarcity well enough even if my grasp on the value of a dollar was “things cost money, and that’s perfectly reasonable, although I’m not entirely clear why,” so to young me the whole thing passed muster.

The part where they were running TV ads for a supposed collector’s item as though you could just buy it in any store, though, that’s on me. I have no excuse for letting that part slide.