Quick Look: Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death

"Oh, are you done in this area?" *explodes* I can get behind that idea.

It's not bad if you turn off your brain.

LOL! Oh my gosh, this game is so dumb, it went full circle into awesomeness! Must play! :-)

This game feels like what every early NES game was trying to sell you via the box art. I really want to play it but I don't know why....

Dang, Pierce got buff.

Looks alright.

Turret sequences are apparently no longer satisfied ruining only first and third person shooters I guess.

Best thing about this game might be the name.

What do you know. Another generic God of War clone on PC.

This looks boring.

Look, I'm not saying its Garshasp, but it still looks uninteresting.

The opening is very Splatterhouse. Guy dies, mask is like 'naw dude lets bring you back'. I dont know why but I enjoy that, very cheesy.

Pretty sure the bad guys operation would not pass OSHA guidelines.

Is Marlow voiced by Arif S. Kinchen (Pierce from Saints Row)?

Sounds like him.

"Flashy, but boring" should be the 505 Games marketing slogan.

xibalba? is this Persona 2?

Vehicles and levels designed by Dr. Robotnik.

It doesn't seem like this is this game, but there could be something to taking the Saint's Row philosophy and applying it to a character action game.

It's the name of a star.

This is a video game.

If anyone ever asks me what a video game is, I'll show them this, because it's the most video game a video game could be.

I'm digging it. It's like a combination between GOW and the PSX game ONE. A solid three stars IMO.

Marlowe Briggs is a man of action. He's got no time for his past.

Time stops and we find out those choppers have no blades. Or else they have blades that still spin so fast we don't see them when time stops.

I played the demo for this on Xbox, it was alright. Something about it reminded me of "One" from PS1 though...<shudder>

I don't have much interest in playing this, but for some reason I really want to watch a complete playthrough.

Those Matrix-ish cutscenes are a welcome alternative to the motion comic stuff that low budget games tend to have. They are kinda drawn out, but at least a kinda novel idea.

Still watching, but I have to say, I find it surprisingly annoying the way Jeff keeps going "Now I'm holding up..." in such a dismissive way. He's acting like he's never played a game where (theoretically) dramatic actions are carried out with simple commands before. I don't even know yet whether the game is any good or not, but Jeff being sarcastic about it right off the bat really rubs me the wrong way. :P

EDIT: Maybe I was in a bad mood earlier, I dunno. Still not down with Jeff meh-ing on the game so early, but I think the game itself looks like a surprising amount of fun. This is probably the first quick look I've seen in years where I've never heard of the game before, and yet I'm actually interested in checking it out after watching.

I feel like this could greatly benefit from a wackier, simpler art style; probably would be cheaper to make too. This lacks a visual identity of its own as is.

And it's depressing to still see QTE's and turret sequences used completely un-ironically in 2013. You would think as a smaller team they would avoid the staples from big budget games that everyone started hating years ago.

Other than that, it seems perfectly okay. The cinematic time stop thing is a pretty stand-out trick.

According to some, a moving object is never in a fixed position at a particular point in time:

Motion is fluid, it is not a ratcheted series of jumping from point to point. Consequently, at any given moment in time, a moving body has no single exact position. Zeno's conjecture, that the arrow is always frozen at some point, cannot be observed, reproduced, or computed, since that's not the way things move. Imagine taking a photograph of a moving object. There will always be some motion blur. No matter how fast is the shutter of your camera, even infinitesimally fast, there will always be some tiny amount of blur. There is no such thing as a moving arrow frozen in time.

Brian Dunning on Zeno's Paradoxes (http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4267 with references in the article)

Is that old Chinese man the same voice actor as the bad guy in the Jackie Chan cartoon? The old wizard dude.

The "ball court" mentioned at 34:14 is actually a reference to the Mesoamerican ballgame, a sport played by the Maya. Now you know!

this looks like it will be a good QL

Yeah, I was curious why he was immediately so bored with the game.
My guess is he's having a bad day.

Finally, the sequel to Akuji the Heartless everybody's been waiting for.

I saw this on XBLM and didn't give it a second thought, but this actually looks pretty good, especially for the price. Most budget character action games have terrible, stiff, and stilted combat, but the gameplay in here looks like how you would want it to play. The still-frame cut scenes are also a nice alternative to the motion comic scenes that are in just about every low-budget-game-trying-to-look-like-a-big-budget-game these days.

This actually looks pretty alright. Specially for the price. Also I like how it's bananas right from the start.

@vinny has a good ear. Then he doubted it. "I think it's someone trying to do him."

Jeff saying that a random budget game like this "kinda OK" is actually pretty good praise. The game started off horribly, with practically no plot, but definitely pleasantly surprised both the duders over the course of the QL.

Glad for a quick look of this as it looked amusing in that b-movie action game on steam based off the trailer, now I know it's at least decent in the controls & not infinitely broken like that other 3rd person action game from earlier in the year (also looked like some trailer trash b-movie setting) with Ride to Hell Retribution (seriously don't get it as negative fun & amazingly broken).

I feel like his name should be Marlowe

Better known as "meh".

looks alright. I might give it a shot. I liked the upside down helicopter sequence.

"You're dead! We killed you!"

I love Jeff for finding time for Robocop references.

This seems cool enough, except maybe for the disjointed story telling.

To be fair, James Hong's voice acting is pretty much the defacto stereotypical voice for an older Chinese man.

This look pretty damn good for a $15 downloadable game. Also, I am totally down with Spirit Knives and Moon Jaguars.

Wait....so was this game making a defenestration (as in throwing someone out a window) "joke", or was that just gibberish, or a misspelling of indefensible. I'm just confused

I think it was more of a "Man [Jeff is] sick of this push the stick for 'platforming' and just watching stuff explode while not really doing anything schtick." kind of thing. Maybe combined with a "explosions for explosions sake is boring" kind of thing. Maybe a bit of both combined with the budget games doing AAA mechanics set him up for a bad game from the get-go. Or maybe I'm putting words in his mouth.

This seems like one character action game I'd enjoy playing.

Yea when they said 505 Games published it and the first cutscene started I was getting ready for some extreme hilarity. And then the game was actually okay. I don't know what that says about me, or 505 Games, or the state of budget games but I was honestly really impressed by this.

Obviously this was made on a budget but super intelligent design choices all around. They didn't have enough money to make fancy cutscenes so they did the swirling camera thing which looks pretty cool and costs a fraction of what it would have taken to actually animate those scenes. They have clear tutorials, a side-kick to help you solve puzzles if you get stuck, and some solid looking combat. Other than the technically weak graphics I wouldn't have been surprised to learn this was the next attempt by EA to copy God of War. This looks perfectly good for $15.

Hmmmm, not bad for 15 bucks considering they want 10 for that Amiga retread you guys gave the "Quick Look" treatment to earlier. Ive played some awful 60 dollar games (um, like anything tied to a movie) so for what it is, this looks decent and wholly acceptable.

As soon as I saw this pop up on Steam I just knew you guys had to do a video. Fantastic!