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The latest RamblePak64 critique doubles as a recommendation to check out Evil West, Flying Wild Hog's action combat game set in the supernatural wild west.
It may seem unusual to apologize for how long it took to get this video out. After all, it’s only April and I’ve already released three videos this year. The last time I even released three videos in a year total was 2019. My track-record since December has generally been pretty good, and has the potential to be my best ever.
While I am glad to have maintained a positive rate of video production thus far, the Evil West analysis would have been available earlier were it not for an unfortunate case of strep throat, the sudden onslaught of depression for about a week or two, and the frustratingly timed food poisoning I suffered. Regardless of these setbacks, the greatest trial was having to edit footage for a game’s combat analysis for the first time since last year’s Darksiders critique. Such editing is a bitterly tiresome, time-consuming task, often requiring lengthy stretches of scrubbing different video clips for the particular instances of gameplay I need. The most common feedback I get regarding this struggle is to simply write down when these things happen, yet the intensity of the moment prevents me from writing down or making note of such specific mechanics. Simultaneously, I do not always know what specific moments I’ll need until I’m far into the game, or on one of my drafts of the script.
Honestly, I cannot say I am entirely satisfied with this video, but that is nothing new. It has been a year since I last completed an analysis of this sort, and even that was after being rusty for some time. Really, however, it was a matter of “rushing” the script at points, something I hope not to do with the next project.
Speaking of, I do not know how long the wait for the next deep dive will be. The script writing process has proven a challenge, but a welcome one. I plan to have an interim video, a bit of an experiment that won’t require any video game capture, but certainly will require video editing. I hope to release that video by mid-May, and for the next deep-dive to be posted some time in June.
Before I leave you, though, I wanted to share a few more thoughts on Evil West that could not fit into the video.
The Super Mario Bros. movie is an absolutely charming ride through Nintendo's Mushroom Kingdom, brought to life by the talented artists at Illumination Studios. Of this, there is no doubt. However, after some viewings at home, I couldn't help but feel like the game's script did not measure up to the artistic talent on-screen.
I had sung the praises quite vocally and publicly of the Super Mario Bros. movie when it released in theaters last year. I acknowledged it was imperfect, sure, but I didn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on this imperfections. I instead emphasized and even exaggerated the good qualities, decrying critics for either being out of touch or simply too biased in their tastes.
However, going back to its home video release, I couldn’t help but feel like there was something lacking. I often have podcasts or movies playing in the background while I complete work tasks, but some movies just do not carry as strongly when you lose the ability to focus on the visual element. When a film can only be carried by its script, you start to realize just how lacking that script may be.
Such was the case with the Super Mario Bros. movie. A lot of that joy was gone once the visual element was taken away.
A rundown of the remaining games of 2023 that left a major impact on me.
The second part of the year in review is now done! I apologize for the delay, as things were busy not only during December, but throughout much of January as well. I also got sick during the holiday break, preventing me from being able to record the necessary audio to even begin video editing.
However, I managed to push through and beat the latest deadline I made for myself: end of January.
I’ve gotta say, working on these two videos back-to-back with a deadline on each was quite the learning experience. At the very least, I am far more comfortable working in Adobe Premiere Elements now, enough so that I am surprised it took me so long to make the jump. I was very attached to my process with Windows Movie Maker 6, but it was clear that it was time to move on to something more modern and far more capable. Premiere Elements still doesn’t have the full suite of options most content creators are utilizing, but it certainly allows for more control over what I can do in a video and how I can integrate sound than before.
However, I’ve been learning a lot of other lessons working on these.
A video rundown of the most impactful games played by RamblePak64 in the first half of 2023.
The first part of the 2023 year in review is now live! I must admit, I’ve been having a lot of fun working on this, even if it’s meant little in the way of gaming time has been done the past couple of weeks. It’s really revitalized my enjoyment of video editing after Alan Wake nearly destroyed it. I’ve also been rethinking my approach to content creation as a whole, as doing an anthology video like this and doing smaller little reviews has been quite a blast. There may be a lot of big changes coming in 2024.
But, before I endeavor to outline those thoughts and plans, I need to finish part two. Unfortunately, I still have two games to complete that are going to be in that video. Fortunately, most of the script is already finished save for those two games, and I am nearly done with one of those titles. This means starting next week I can begin recording audio and cutting video together even while completing the rest of the titles.
Which is, perhaps, the greatest benefit to this Year in Review project: it has confirmed that the work flow I had begun experimenting with on the now shelved Alan Wake video not only works, but has increased my enjoyment of making videos by a great amount.
Chris and Shamus experience technical difficulties all so Resident Evil 5 can prolong their suffering in this final entry of their streaming series.
Resident Evil 5 was not satisfied with its boss-rush conclusion we would be forced to endure. It had to throw in A.I. glitches and broken net code to prolong our suffering.
Though in our final write-ups, both Shamus and I reflected generally positively on the experience. On Shamus’ part, his is ultimately more positive though less in-depth due to his lacking history on the franchise. He does, however, include one of his wonderful Stolen Pixels strips and its impeccable comedic writing.
My write-up, on the other hand, was far more in-depth and still captures many of my thoughts on the game. Even looking back and rewatching, there’s a lot of elements to the final fight that leave me confused. “Wait, I remember there were a lot of steps, but… which steps did I need to follow and in what order…?” The boss design is poor in that it requires very specific rail-roading without clear sign-posting.
Still, it’s a fun game, and I’ve even found a new source of joy.
The secret to brain-washing is to apply it to the chest. That's where the brain is.
The fifth is also the shortest episode Shamus and I recorded for our Resident Evil 5stream series. He hadn’t been feeling well and, in hindsight, it is quite obvious he was having a more miserable time than usual as a result. It’s good we cut the stream short.
While his write-up on the episode was quite short and focused primarily on recovering long-lost files of his Stolen Pixels comic series (of which he shared one of his best in said post), I feel like this sixty minutes is also a nice vertical slice of the game’s problems. The environmental inconsistency, where you’ll go from high-tech laboratory to old ruins in an instant without any sense of continuity. It’s almost as if they randomly shuffled environments and set-pieces during development after they’d already styled and textured them rather than before. The pointless and clumsy cover mechanics compared to the superior Gears of War cover system. The absolutely terrible dialogue and story.
One element that only occurred to me watching this time was the Licker horde, however. I recall playing the first Resident Evil: Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS and thinking the limited enemy types in a single level was in part due to the limitations of being a handheld. One level had nothing but Hunters, for example, only for another to exclusively pit you against wolves. Later levels would better mix said enemies up, however. Here, the only time you ever face Lickers is when there’s a whole crowd of them.
Perhaps on my next playthrough I’ll try and observe the dynamics within the human opponents that feel natural and appropriate while waves of Lickers feel like a cheap, hasty development trick.
The ouroboros is perhaps the worst fight in Resident Evil 5, and all due to just a few small, poor design decisions.
The corresponding blog post by Shamus had already gone into great detail regarding the boss fight with the Ouroboros creature, but I am most interested in the response in the comments section. Many had made note of their own awful experiences to this boss, or referenced other streamers that had a similarly confusing time. Yet still there was the odd comment, shrugging their shoulders and saying “I don’t know what to tell ya, I found it simple to comprehend”.
I am a strong believer that true objectivity may be impossible, but it is still something to strive for when examining a work critically. You want to understand the developer’s intent and what common response players have to it. However, there is no disregarding of personal taste and whether the subjective preferences of the developer will align with the audience or not. This is where “intended audience” becomes an important factor, and while it must be taken into account for anyone seeking as objective an analysis as possible, it must also be recognized that, sometimes, one person’s experience is just that: one person’s experience.
That is to say, while it is possible to immediately understand the logistics of the fight, there are too many questionable or vague features that go against common gaming expectations to make the proper course of action clear.
In today's episode of Resident Evil 5, Chris Redfield points his gun fervently while asking obvious questions that the villain has no reason to answer. The villain then transforms into a giant fish.
In his connecting blog post for this episode, Shamus brought up a lot of arguments he had heard in defense of the Resident Evil franchise. I don’t think each of those defenses were intended for Resident Evil 5, specifically. The one regarding controls, for example, was likely meant for the first three games plus the Code Veronica spin-off, where the tank controls were always of controversy even at the time.
In regards to the story, however, I think Shamus is correct in that the developers weren’t intentionally trying to imitate Western B-movie shlock. There are a surprising number of fans of grindhouse style features in the older sphere of Japanese game developers, but those games have a clearly distinct style to match. MadWorld or Shadows of the Damned bear those marks far more closely than anything Capcom has produced. Instead, Resident Evil is clearly inspired by the classic George Romero series of Living Dead films and more, a variety of creature features from several decades of time, as well as modern Hollywood trends.
However, this also dismisses the nature of Japanese entertainment itself and the variety of clashing tones it can possess. Having seen a variety of live-action films in addition to anime, Japanese entertainment often has a certain tone, or combination of tones, that do not always fit the standards of Western entertainment. Or rather, you ask two people to make two desserts based on chocolate and one person presents you with a cake while the other provides a milkshake. They are both sweet and chocolatey desserts, certainly, and both will contribute to a potential diabetes problem, but they aren’t the same kind of dessert.
Japan’s sense of humor, self-awareness, and concept of “cool” can often come off like that, and when presented out of context with the intent of appealing to a global audience, it can become downright goofy or dumb.
Resident Evil 5 continues its tug of war of being an actually fun cooperative shooter and being an exercise in bafflement and anger.
Our adventure through Plagas infested Africa continues as Shamus and I venture back into Resident Evil 5. We had performed some experiments and confirmed that the theory of the game dropping the other player’s ammunition types was largely correct. It seems like a rather misguided method of encouraging cooperation between players, or perhaps is weighted too heavily towards providing ammo of the wrong type. This almost always guarantees that, as the player’s resources dwindle throughout a fight, they’ll have to rely on their partner staying close and navigating the inventory in order to make the trade. Not only do the game’s encounters encourage the players to split up, but the fights are often intense enough that opening the inventory will leave you vulnerable.
Obviously this system can be managed, as I have played the game multiple times with multiple different friends throughout the years. It’s more a matter of an implementation that is not quite ideal, as it often makes cooperating more difficult. Simultaneously, there’s the trouble of playing the game solo with only the artificial intelligence as your companion. After a strange disconnection, Shamus was forced to watch the stream as A.I. Sheva made strange decisions and wasted all of his pistol ammunition. My own experience recollects instances of Sheva wasting shotgun ammunition trying to shoot an enemy at a rifle’s distance, or that was intended to be shot with turrets planted in the environment. The A.I. was incapable of manning said turrets on their own, instead needing to be instructed by the player. It taught me that the A.I. will waste ammo on their own, and that constantly instructing them was only costing me time and leaving me vulnerable, so better to leave it with the pistol and let it run out of the most common ammunition, turning the remainder of the fight into a single-player experience.
I feel that the inventory’s three-by-three design was in part chosen as an easy way to map item shortcuts to the D-Pad, but in 2007 Dead Space would not only allow the player to simply set those shortcuts up themselves, but healing and stasis energy would always be mapped to two separate buttons. Perhaps it would have been worth adding an additional three slots to Resident Evil 5’s inventory and adopting the Dead Space model instead – especially if you were going to force armor to take up a slot.
Juggling inventory between two players certainly forces teamwork, but the question is whether it’s fun and enjoyable or if you’ve managed to frustrate not one, but two players with this constant chore.
The first episode of Shamus and I streaming a playthrough of Resident Evil 5, filled with equal amounts of mirth and frustration. Well, maybe more frustration than mirth.
February of last year marked the beginning of Shamus and I streaming Resident Evil 5, one of my most beloved yet flawed games. There’s nothing quite like it, nor has there been anything like it since. I imagine some might point to Resident Evil 6 as being similar, but that game had so many AAA ambitions that all collapsed under the sheer weight and lack of focus to it all. Here, Resident Evil 5 seems like a simple enough proposition: take what made Resident Evil 4 so good, and reconfigure it for two-player co-op.
I had written an introduction for Shamus to try and set the scene as a brief explanation as to why this game exists, as well as propose my own mission to try and analyze and figure out what the game does well. Instead, the series was more mocking and groaning than it was positive analysis, as so many decisions end up being quite baffling and even confusing. It is a game that I think will need a proper analytical video one day.
As for this episode in particular, Shamus had many a gripe regarding the ammunition system. At first we were under the impression that the game intended certain weapons for certain characters – so the shotgun for Chris and the TMP and rifle for Sheva – but as the series went on, I began to theorize if the ammunition system is instead based around what your partner has, specifically, in order to encourage teamwork.
Such a creative decision would truly encapsulate all that makes Resident Evil 5 what it is.
Enjoy the final episode of our Batman: Arkham Origins series, wherein we continue to gripe about the story and boss encounter design. Bonus impromptu podcast wherein we conjure up a potential Superman game!
Here we are at the conclusion of Batman: Arkham Origins, a game I greatly enjoyed streaming with friend Shamus Young despite the technical difficulties. Even in the last stretch of gameplay we were griping about story and boss design, completely baffled by the decisions that led to this end product.
Shamus’ final thoughts on the game tackled many of the justifications for Batman’s behavior in Arkham City, Arkham Origins, and Arkham Knight. It should be noted that Paul Dini, responsible for much of the animated series’ quality in writing and chief writer of Arkham Asylum, had less involvement in Arkham City and then no involvement after that. The man that came to define Batman for many had little or no involvement in the games where he feels most out-of-character.
Even disregarding the animated series, this Batman feels out of character for the one found in Batman: Year One, Batman: The Long Halloween, and Batman: Dark Victory. Perhaps it’s a matter of preferring certain writer’s interpretations, or being ignorant of other notable Batman storylines, but it feels like the chief writers at both Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Interactive Montreal have very different ideas of just who Batman is compared to some of the authors of his best stories.
Which could also explain why none of the villains feel right, either.
Chris and Shamus engage in the Arkham Origins equivalent of a filler arc.
It’s a good thing I stopped trying to stream as my primary content. I found it exhausting hearing myself talk over and over about how I was feeling sick, and if I found myself exhausting to hear then I can only imagine how others must have felt.
There was so little to say this episode that Shamus effectively gave me the post on his blog for the week. It was an opportunity to express my feelings regarding the combat in writing, though it also naturally led to some debate in the comments section. For some, these issues were not exclusive to Arkham Origins – and I would agree, they are issues that persist in the other games as well. However, there’s a polish in those games that mitigates the flaws whereas Origins manages to amplify them. Still there were others that insisted these flaws didn’t exist and it was effectively a skill issue.
At the very least, Shamus, who was far more familiar with the combat systems of all four games than I will ever be, could confirm that there was just something off with the mechanics of Origins. I take comfort in that.
I take only confusion from this week’s play session. The bridge might be one of the better set pieces of the game, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.
Part four of our Arkham Origins saga cannot help but begin to completely collapse on itself, supported by too many villains, nonsensical motivations, a complete lack of logic, and everything is on fire. Why is everything always on fire?
Another video, another technical problem. Aside from the poor framerate, I had also forgotten to adjust my audio delay from a prior stream. This would result in Batman punching a thug but the sound of impact coming well after it should have. Typically this audio delay was the result of my playing on console with friends, where the Elgato device I used at the time had an automatic delay in its video and audio feed. I implemented an audio delay to my voice and those of my friends on Discord, but as I was playing Arkham Origins on PC, it led to the PC game’s audio being out of alignment as well.
Fortunately I don’t have to worry about such issues with my current Elgato, but I’m also not really streaming that often these days either. Such is life.
I’m going to be honest, despite some of the technical stumbles, fumbling over our own words, and my uncanny inability to concentrate on speech and gameplay at the same time, this might be my favorite episode of streaming this game. We hit a lot of design elements, and I think actually analyzing a level with Shamus has better helped me to stop and consider a game’s environment or narrative better today.
In our third episode of Batman: Arkham Origins, which doesn't really tell the origin of Arkham Asylum at all, we experience cut-scene ineptitude on the part of the writers, ask obvious questions that cause all of the plausibility to fall apart, and struggle with yet another boss fight. Exciting!
Though we stumble into another series of bitrate problems in this stream, the real technical difficulty is my own brain. My mind is one of digressions, and it is because I am easily distracted by the smallest threads. In regards to streaming, my thoughts can immediately be interrupted by trying to work out the problem immediately in front of me. Even when I’m trying to focus on finally making my point to Shamus regarding proportions of objects in the Arkham series level design, I am frequently tugging on every little thread that distracts from my attention within the game world.
I can only imagine how frustrating it is to be the person I’m trying to speak with in these circumstances, let alone the person having to watch and listen. Over a year later I’m listening to myself and all I can think is “get to the point already!”
It really is a curiosity to see what happens when a game with a specific art team and style is passed off to an entirely different team now tasked with recreating that style, but are instructed to do so on a schedule. As we can see with Gotham Knights, Warner Bros. Interactive Montreal pulled off a far more consistent, if less imaginative, world since they were allowed to define their interpretation of Gotham from the ground up. Here, however, they may not have had enough time to properly study and consult Rocksteady’s own concept art and approach to the world of Gotham, and as such we see objects in strange proportions that result in a world that never quite feels right.
The real villain of episode two are the technical difficulties, from Shamus' audio being blown out to the constant dropping of frames. Join Chris and the late and great Shamus as they battle cops and streaming problems alike.
Our second stream is, naturally, where all the technical difficulties had arisen, with the primary one being Shamus’ blown out mic gain. We tried several times to fix his audio, but unfortunately no matter how it sounded for us, it did not sound well on the actual stream. Additionally, trying to screen share with him and Twitch led to some frequent frame drops.
This happens with every group stream I have with friends. No matter what audio settings remain unchanged between streams, the volume of friends will vary. I have a feeling there’s something going on with Discord between each call, but only because that’s the common source of the call.
It is for this reason I tend to proselytize the Elgato Wave:3 as much as I do, because no matter how loud I set the volume I come in nice and clear. Simultaneously, I don’t need to set the gain very high for it to capture my voice at a decent volume. The only thing missing are sound absorbers to reduce echo, which is barely an issue under most circumstances. It’s a top notch, “affordable” mic (compared to what most professional level microphones are asking for), and I got better quality than similarly priced Snowball and other model microphones frequently used by streamers.
