The Hotdog Laserhouse

Oh! Right! You reminded me, I never posted about this on tumblr. I’m all out of sorts these days. If y’all out there reading my blog like my Dare to Scare videos, here’s another one, and it’s a grab bag of indie horror games.

I mean, Inside definitely seems like an okay concept. Certainly, the Lovecraftian undertones can be done well, and I think there are scary concepts in there. I can see how the game would evolve to become scarier as you played. They give you a device for detecting “the energy” but it only ever registers when you can see a physical being, but totally expect that once you get far enough, eventually the being will die and you just have to use the device to detect something that’s invisible. If done right, that could be terrifying! Like the very first year I did Dare to Scare, there was a game with an invisible monster, and I couldn’t get past it because it legit scared me.

It does feel amateur, and in that regard I think the developer is kind of punching above their weight class. Which is admirable, but also… know your limits and scope appropriately, I guess. There can be a charm when something shoots for the stars but can’t quite go the distance, but that’s not a guarantee.

English being a second language wouldn’t excuse the weird waddling animation the monster does, or the missing ceiling texture in the power room, or the fact you can’t skip the intro cutscene. I think certain gameplay concepts are indelible and cross language barriers because fun is fun. Like, the rules of soccer don’t really change just because you speak Spanish or Italian, right? The game is the game.

What also struck me is that… I think I play four games in this grab bag, but I downloaded seven or eight. Two of the games in the video have poor English, and I played two more on my own time that also have poor English. That means half the games I downloaded (most of which were rated as “popular” on Itch.io in the horror tag) were by developers who made English-language horror games despite it not being their primary language. That’s very interesting, and I wonder what that says about the state of the horror gaming genre.

The full list of games I downloaded, incidentally: TRAPT, Lights Out, Skywatching, Cursed Soul, Tape, Inside, Jack’s Home, and Dispatch. Of the ones not featured in the video, I played Lights Out, Cursed Soul, and Tape on my own time. The only game out of that batch I haven’t played yet is Skywatching, come to think of it.

Lights Out could possibly be described as an inverted Five Nights At Freddy’s. I think you’re house sitting or something – it’s not important. Point is, the lights keep going out and something is lurking in the darkness. Your phone has a light, but you have limited battery, but you have to head down and reset the fuse box every so often and manage which rooms have lights on and which don’t. I think I managed to turn my phone’s flashlight on but couldn’t turn it back off, so I ended up not playing it very far.

Cursed Soul is one of those games that punches way above its weight class. You’re like, a detective and can shift in to the spirit realm like Soul Reaver on PS1. It’s more like an adventure game, where you have to gather items and use them to solve puzzles. It’s a cool idea but it’s lacking a lot of polish and the puzzle solutions could get pretty bland.

I played about five minutes of Tape. Nothing I haven’t seen before, and the game is caked in bad VHS filters, amateur voice acting, and it’s a generic chase game in a boring, pseudo-retro environment. There’s also an obnoxiously loud “jump scare” if you get caught. It doesn’t happen when you’re caught, it only happens after you pick “quit” or “retry.” It’s more annoying than anything, because it’s deafening static noise.

I should probably make time and play Skywatching soon.

I liked Halo Anniversary when I first saw it, but over time, it’s become the sort of thing that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny very well. It looks a bit like an Unreal Engine fan remake, except I think fans would probably be a little more faithful to preserving the original game’s art style. I’m glad they let you switch back to the old graphics, at least, though if you go digging, you’ll find articles and videos showing that the “old graphics” modes in both Anniversary games are broken and are missing effects.

That being said, I can’t imagine playing Halo 2 Anniversary in the old graphics, even if they were preserved perfectly. Halo 2 Anniversary is a legitimate upgrade to the original game, and it does a much better job of preserving the game’s original art direction – even improving on it, in some cases.

There’s a level late in the game where you’re the Arbiter driving through a snowy section on a Halo ring, and it’s sort of hard to know where to go, because it’s a series of long, connected warzones. There’s too many enemies with too much firepower to stop and fight everyone, so you’re kind of supposed to just rush through and avoid crossfire. In the original Halo 2, there was almost an element of trial-and-error because you just had to figure it out as you went.

In Halo 2 Anniversary, they actually mark out specific “roads” through the snow, giving some idea of how you’re supposed to navigate these areas. There’s little touches like that in the updated Anniversary graphics that actually help make the game a little more playable. It’s still Halo 2, though, and Halo 2 still sucks, for the most part. But it’s better.

Though they still mess up every now and then, like with Cortana, here. Her head’s just a little too big in the Anniversary graphics, and it throws off the proportions of her whole body. Less expressive, too, somehow. A small price to pay, I guess.

If it wasn’t for the Anniversary graphics I’m not sure I would’ve re-finished Halo 2. I played the Xbox version on my 360 all the way back in 2006 or 2007 and haven’t touched it since. Halo 2 Anniversary also redoes all the cutscenes, which I think look genuinely impressive now – but more importantly, it also re-directs all of the cutscenes, too. So it’s using all of the same dialog, but the pacing of all the cinematics is way punchier, so I actually became surprisingly invested in the story. I still think humanizing the Covenant aliens was a bad idea, but at the very least, I enjoyed the story in Halo 2.

I think part of that is also the optional terminals hidden around the game, which give greater context to the story leading in to both Halo 1 and Halo 2. You get to understand way more about how the Prophets formed the Covenant, how they mislead and controlled the races within it, and the history behind the role of “Arbiter.” Provides more weight and context to the story that wasn’t originally there.

Halo games are such that their stories are usually very simple – basically an action movie. Hiding extended universe lore in the terminals is a great idea. I’ve never played Halo 4 or 5, but I hope they have terminals, too. Though I assume they don’t, because I remember a lot of people complaining they didn’t know who the Didact was.

Unfortunately, this isn’t really something I can talk about at length, because I’m not someone who is familiar with the depths of this. All I really know is that:

To start, Hedgehog Engine 2 provides some legitimate improvements to lighting detail in different kinds of textures. There were these images going around:

I don’t know enough about shader technology to tell you exactly what’s going on here, but the results are obvious enough. Hedgehog Engine 2 seems to incorporate some kind of texture self-shadowing in to its global illumination pass.

But what I also know is that Hedgehog Engine 1 was at its most robust in Sonic Unleashed, and after the engine designer left, Sonic Team gradually began stripping out features for being “too expensive” to render (read: they made the framerate bad).

This makes some amount of sense, because the framerate in Sonic Unleashed, particularly in the last few levels, could get pretty bad. There’s a few places in Eggmanland where the framerate can get down to single digits. Sonic Generations, which uses an “updated” version of Hedgehog Engine that’s a bit more conservative features-wise, maintains a pretty solid 30fps on console a lot better.

But Sonic Team didn’t stop there. They kept stripping features out, because they got it in their heads that Hedgehog Engine should hit 60fps. So all the beautiful and bleeding edge lighting technology, all the fancy material rendering, all of it got stripped out or simplified for Sonic Lost World. From what I remember hearing from people in the know, Sonic Lost World will never be able to render levels from Sonic Generations because it’s missing too many features.

I believe Dario (of Unleashed Project fame) ported over Jungle Joyride to Sonic Lost World, and it crushes the engine. Completely wrecks it. You need to have a PC far in excess of the expected system requirements to even play it, because it was not designed to render something like that. Just completely butchered.

From what I remember hearing, Hedgehog Engine 2 is very similar to the same version of Hedgehog Engine 1 used in Sonic Lost World, with some of the more “expensive” features added back in – but not all of them. And some, like the lighting engine, were obviously changed or replaced entirely.

I realize this isn’t a lot of hard information, and I’m sure I’ll get a reply on Twitter from one or more people clarifying my half-remembered truths. But that’s the general impression I have been left with: HE2 is better in some ways, but worse in many others.

Oh yeah, I’ve been watching the entire thing as its released. I love Freeman’s Mind.

Though lately I’ve started to think the last few episodes have been a lot of Ross just… yelling a lot. The fun, weird thought tangents that I think have defined the series have been fewer and farther between because he’s in a heavy-action segment and it’s been episode after episode of “I HATE THIS I’M BEING SHOT AT IT’S THE WORST YOU GUYS SUCK WAAAAAH”

It’s compounded by the fact that he skipped some puzzles and quieter detours so he could keep yelling about the helicopter. I understand he probably just wants to get through the segment, because the duel with the helicopter goes on for, like, practically a quarter of all Half-Life 2, but I think slowing down for, like, the washing machine weight puzzle, or the headcrab detour in the dried out waterway could have given a bit of respite from all the screaming.

Then again, I’m sure he didn’t exactly ignore those segments when figuring out how to write the episode, so he probably just couldn’t come up with a good way to work them in. The headcrab detour is kind of a weird dead end, and the washing machine puzzle is what I would describe as “pure video games” and he already joked about physics puzzles with the barrels in the water.

Thankfully, once he reaches Eli’s, the next few sequences are much slower and quieter, so it’s not like Freeman’s Mind is just “the Ross Scott shouts at a helicopter” show.

I bet he’s quietly beating himself up for not being able to hit Ravenholm in time for Halloween. He’s close enough that it would’ve been perfect timing, but it is what it is. I know how it goes, so I’m not even disappointed or anything.

I increasingly wonder how the series will end. He could wrap things up at the end of Half-Life 2, which at this rate will take him another four years, at least. But by then, maybe Valve will follow up on… the thing that happens. In the thing.

With the stuff.

But then, how does he adapt the lead up to that?

Then again, for him to get to a point where that’s a going concern, we’re talking about, like… ten years of Freeman’s Mind from now. Who knows where any of us will be in ten years. Even five years!

Uh. What was I talking about?

At this rate, I could maybe be considered a Need for Speed “fan.” A casual one, mind you, but I’ve put significant time in to:

• Hot Pursuit 2 (PC)
• Hot Pursuit 2 (PS2, which is a different, much better game)
• Underground 1 (PC, later Gamecube)
• Most Wanted 2005 (Xbox 360)
• Hot Pursuit 2010 (Xbox 360 and PC)
• Rivals (PS4)

I have also touched:

• Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed (PS1, Saturn)
• Hot Pursuit 1 (PS1)
• High Stakes (PS1)
• Porsche Unleashed (PS1, GBA)
• Underground 2 (PC)
• Shift (Xbox 360)
• Nitro (Wii)
• Most Wanted 2012 (PC)
• Payback (PS4)

I’m not really in deep enough to understand what parallels you’re describing, though. To me, Need for Speed comes in two flavors: before “The Fast & The Furious” and after.

So, like, Underground, Carbon, Undercover, Most Wanted, The Run, Payback, all of those games are Electronic Arts trying very, very, very hard to appeal to the F&F crowd. And it’s very obvious, too, given their increasing push to have more and more story elements, usually revolving around a team (”family”) of lawless street racers who get tangled up in events bigger than just cars with neon lights.

Games that don’t follow that tract are responses: it’s EA admitting “We can’t make F&F ripoffs forever.”

So we get Need for Speed Shift, which is a serious-business circuit racer with some very cool visual feedback for simulating what it feels like to be inside of a real race car. We get Hot Pursuit 2010, a psuedo-remaster/remake that pushes back towards the Need for Speed roots of “exotic supercars racing around forest mountain roads.” 

But it’s always two sides of the same coin. “Regular” Need for Speed games and F&F-wannabe Need for Speed games.

Personally, I prefer games like Hot Pursuit more. Especially after the blisteringly-awful brush I had with Need for Speed Payback this week.

I mean, what it sounds like to me is that no, it wasn’t a very successful investment. Few games used Hedgehog Engine. You say Alien Isolation, but apparently that uses something called CATHODE, not Hedgehog. To my knowledge, Hedgehog Engine was used in:

• Sonic Unleashed
• Phantasy Star Online 2
• Sonic Generations
• Sonic Lost World
• Mario & Sonic: Sochi 2014

And Hedgehog Engine 2 is:

• Sonic Forces
• Sakura Wars
• Mario & Sonic: Tokyo 2020

And I think there’s a precedent that after the development of Hedgehog Engine, Sonic games started having lower budgets. I’m willing to bet the lack of adoption of Hedgehog Engine attributed to that. May even explain why Hedgehog Engine 2 isn’t apparently as robust as Hedgehog Engine 1, if data mining is to be believed.

This is an extremely difficult question to answer, because that just makes me ask, “have we seen good 3D Sonic level design?”

I understand that’s going to cause a knee-jerk reaction because, well, harumph, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Generations, Sonic Colors, so on and so forth.

But at the same time… could that be considered good level design? It could be better, certainly. An over-reliance on scripting is, as ever, a major problem in these games.

Should 3D Sonic games after Unleashed even be counted, given how often they drop in to side-scrolling segments? If you counted play time, I’m willing to bet games like Sonic Colors are 75% side-scrolling segments.

So for “pure” 3D Sonic games, we have SA1, SA2, Heroes, Shadow and Sonic 06. Five games. Definitively, Heroes and Shadow do not have good level design, in my eyes. Too much repetition, too long, too big.

Sonic 06 is a bit harder to judge because it plays so poorly, but even in the P-06 fan game, White Acropolis, Aquatic Base, Dusty Desert and Flame Core feel kind of clumsy and weird. That’s basically half the game, right there.

The Sonic and Shadow levels in SA2 are… good, but they’re kind of one-note. And all the levels around them (Shooting and Hunting) are Actually Bad.

Sonic Adventure 1 comes the closest to what would traditionally be defined as “good level design.” Levels are have varied mechanics and they’re paced well. Though, again, the non-Sonic levels can kind of drag things down (though even then, not too much).

But, more to the point, how you define “good level design” is more about what goals it is meant to accomplish within the game’s own rules. You can have very bad game mechanics placed in to good level design, and vice versa.

Ergo, it’s not necessarily possible to say in general terms what “good 3D sonic level design” is like, because it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with that specific game. And when we’re talking about Sonic games, that changes. One of the reasons I think Sonic Unleashed is better than Sonic Generations is because the levels in Unleashed feel more thrilling to play, even though according to the game’s own code, Sonic runs faster in Generations.

And what those games are trying to accomplish is different than what Heroes is trying to accomplish, which is also different from what SA2 is doing, etc.

So, really, I can’t say what makes good 3D Sonic level design. It’s a bit like asking, “what are the best tires?” It depends on the conditions. Street? Dirt? Mud? Gravel? How many wheels, and what’s the weight of the vehicle? What PSI are they at, hard or soft?

I realize that’s a lot of text to get to a nothing answer, but so it goes on this blog, sometimes.

Great news! I wrote a sizable article about this over on bltn.net that will answer all of your questions.

https://www.bltn.net/post/625535204628594688/the-mind-behind-a-hoax-creator

Marble Garden Zone, maybe. Seems nice and quiet, there’s already structures to live in, and it’s not far from the coast. You could argue maybe its susceptible to earthquakes, but I think that was more a result of Eggman’s drilling machine. Earthquakes in Marble Garden never seemed to just happen on their own.

The only other question would be traps, I guess. All the spike pits, the rotating spike pillars, and the arrow traps. How many of those were set up by Eggman, and how many of those were naturally part of the environment?

Given the size of Marble Garden and the fact it quite clearly appears to be more of an ancient city than any kind of place guarding a holy relic, I’m assuming the traps were constructed by Eggman, otherwise the Echidna people that used to live there would be in constant danger.

So it would probably be okay to live in.

But that’s also strictly speaking as a place where you’d kind of have to make your own living. You’d have to start a farm, catch your own food, tend your own crops, etc. It’d be quiet, but hard work.

Realistically speaking, Studiopolis would probably be a better fit for my current needs as a human person, because that’s just a big city. Like, Studiopolis probably does not have just indoor plumbing, but it has, like… internet access. TV. Roads. Cars. A subway system. And so on. It’s probably like Akihabara crossed with Hollywood, or something. The only downside is that the rent is probably super expensive.

But that’s the thing, I guess. Sonic never visits small cities. He’s either tomb raiding mysterious ruins out on an uncharted island, or he’s in a place where the rent is over $3000/mo.

But if those are my options, that’s what I go with, I guess.

I imagine it’s a very stressful job and not everyone is cut out for it. When you sign on to be a video producer at Giantbomb, you aren’t just in the control room, cutting or editing video. You have to be a personality.

Some people start out slowly. Drew and Jan, as I recall, were way more “behind the scenes” at first, and then slowly became more and more on-camera personalities. It used to be that you’d only hear from Jan sometimes but now he carries whole entire streams by himself. Instead of being a silent podcast director, he’s an active chair.

Dan, for his part, from what I’ve heard, sounded like he was getting bored. Jeff has complained over the years that getting anything approved with CBS was a very slow process because it sounds like GiantBomb sort of ran itself, and thus, CBS felt like they didn’t need to spend extra money on special projects. Dan apparently liked to be spontaneous, but that would get dragged down in the bureaucracy of getting corporate approval. So, he moved on to a job where he wouldn’t have to worry about that, while still being able to do spontaneous stuff on his own time through Twitch.

Now, Abby was, specifically, someone they hired because they wanted her both on camera and behind the scenes. They hired a comedian. At the same time, I sort of feel bad for Abby because she was very often out of her depth in the games most of Giantbomb would be interested in. There are a lot of group streams where Abby comes off as confused, disconnected, and a little upset. I grew to like Abby a lot, and I appreciated the different perspectives she brought to Giantbomb, but she always felt a little out of place, and I’ve always wondered how long it would take before she dipped out.

And the way she makes it sound, she had been planning on leaving for a while and was looking for the right time to make her exit. With CBS selling off CNET (and by extension Gamespot and GiantBomb), she apparently said that transition period seemed like as good a time as any to make her exit. A new corporation would mean signing new contracts, which would potentially lock her in to working at Giantbomb even longer than she wanted.

It’s also not hard to pick up on some of the weirdness I think she experienced being the only woman at Giantbomb. She built her own streaming room in her apartment, but I’ve heard rumors that people started “getting weird” about that, like maybe trying to figure out where she lived or something, and that’s why she ended up renting a tiny office to stream from these last couple months – she wanted somewhere discreet and private, where nobody could stalk her or make creepy comments about her living space. Sadly, she’s not the only video personality in the games media who eventually stepped out of the spotlight because of creepers.

I think this stuff would also feel less weird if it wasn’t in the middle of the worst pandemic in over a hundred years. In better times, Dan’s empty seat would have been filled within a month or two, as would Abby’s. Now, who even knows when that’s going to happen. I don’t know if GiantBomb even has an office anymore. GB East certainly doesn’t, because that tiny studio they broadcast from was on the CBS lot.

It’s a strange time for everything and everyone. I wouldn’t blame anyone too much, it’s just circumstances.