Spookin' With Scoops: 04/24/2014

Patrick's prediction of Dreadout's final release giving a bit of an intro to the story was pretty spot on.. though honestly it was a whole lot better with the mystery of it all. I really wonder what happened between the demo and release, they hardly look like the same game.

@patrickklepek You ever think about investing in an audio range compressor? Love watching you play scary games but my ears can't take the insane spikes when you yell. Have to turn it up quit a bit to hear you talk and when you scream it's deafening. Not fun man.

I do not find Japanese horror scary at all.

@meauntienora: I wondered about how deep it got into horror. I like the concept, and the visuals are striking, but held off on buying it for whatever reason.

@goldrock: In that QL they didn't get to some of the creepier enemy types, such as skeletons that can go underground and flank you, spectral things that charge at you, and my favorite so far: "Natives" who hide in bushes and mimic bird calls to communicate. An empty field can easily reveal itself to host 3 or 4 of these enemies, and it's challenging to fight more than 2 at once.

But when you slow down and observe the environment, you notice subtle cues that they are there. They are nearly invisible when hiding in bushes and only move rarely, but from certain vantage points you can see a slight human form skulking occasionally. They also mimic bird calls to communicate, and you quickly learn to perk up your ears and listen. Even though this sound reveals their presence, they remain stealthy until you get close, so you have to keep listening to pinpoint their locations. When you walk into a clearing and hear 6 bird calls from every direction, it invokes a sense of tension that I have rarely felt from games in many years.

@patrickklepek: that Betrayer game that Brad and Vinny did a QL of looked pretty interesting, albeit not very scary

@patrickklepek: A standalone Blair Witch stream is the best way to handle it at this point. The game's just a curse we need to expunge.

I'd recommend Clock Tower 3, quite a fantastic game but it would probably take some time to get going. Some genuinely disturbing stuff in there. The Corroder, oh god.

Yeah, i've gone from loving this feature to just liking it, based purely on the fact that I liked when it was about Patrick playing obscure, creepy games and the Blair Witch game hasn't scratched that itch for me. I'd be all for the series going back to its roots with all-horror all the time.

Hec-aitomix compels you to finish this game! There can be no escape.

Ideally, the way Spookin' With Scoops would function is to have one or two tiny indie games that aren't worth playing (or only last) for more than 20 minutes. Then, we continue down the path of a game we've already been messing with. Unfortunately, I am just so tired of Blair Witch, and we're going to rip that from our collective lives in a stream tomorrow. I'm open to suggestions on what game comes after that. Fatal Frame sounds great, but I would need to buy a second monitor in order to make it work. As for the semi-regularity of the feature, well...this happens late at night after a full day of work. I don't always want to give up my nights, as much as I love this feature! But we'll do it more often.

@assinass: Yeah, I think it was Brad who showed the bear part on a UPF or something. Which definitely is the best part of 2, but 1 has sooo many good parts in it, like the school and the department store.

Are we forgetting Fear Gauntlet?

It wasn't Patrick but Giant Bomb has covered those games before. Unless if Patrick has confessed to not ever having played Condemned which would be a huge problem. A huge HOBO BASHING problem.

BlahblahblahHec-aitomixblahblahblahblahHec-aitomixblahblahblahblahHec-aitomixblahblahblah

Funny that Patrick forgot about that door slamming shut behind him psyche out scare from when he played Dreadout before. That was pretty much the only thing that I remembered from the 1st time.

Also I haven't even watched him play the Blair Witch parts since the first one but I think it's funny for him to force his way to the end despite so many people not wanting him to haha.

DAT BEAR DOE

@flacracker: Oh okay, I didn't know that maybe I will go back and play FEAR again, then.

@flacracker: Massive screw you to you and to everyone that quoted this massive gif. Had to wait like 10 min for all those damn things to load before the video could be played. Rather annoying bug on the site as the video player ui to start it won't load till that stuff does and if you cancel the page then the video ui never loads.

Been so long! Sad I missed it live but pumped to get another Spookin.

@handlas: I think he feels compelled to finish it for his own reasons; be it nostalgia or whatever else. He's gonna stream again in a couple days and finish it to get it out of the way.

I gotta say, though, it was hilarious watching Patrick unravel towards the end of this while the entire chat was calling for him to move to a different game.

I agree with some other comments that I get bummed out every time I see he is playing those Blair Witch games. I don't think I've even bothered to watch it all now. Move on to other games please! I say that because I enjoy this feature a lot... just not that game.

Hopefully he is almost done with it. And this is coming from someone that has seen the movie probably 8-10 times (really love it... way better than the Paranormal movies for sure). Heed Alex's advice Patrick. Stop feeling impulsed to finish all games. If the game is bad and if you are not enjoying the game, don't feel you need to finish it. :)

What the hell is that super creepy, doll looking thing behind Patrick?

@harinosho said:

I think it's a northeastern U.S. thing (and also the parts of Canada near that region).

I live near Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and it's not uncommon here, and I've heard people from quite a few different northeastern states say it. Never really heard southerners say it, and I feel like I've had a decent amount of exposure to west coast lingo through streams from Giant Bomb, Penny Arcade, and the FGC, and none of them seem to say it. Before a bunch of Americans get all up in arms, whatever, Chicago is the northeastern quadrant of your country; I don't care if it's technically in the midwest.

In the usage I think you're referring to, "buddy" doesn't have any friendly connotations, and is either a neutral pronoun meaning "guy" or "this guy" that you generally don't personally know, or it carries a slightly sarcastic tone in that you're definitely not buddies.

Also, yeah, this Blair Witch game is just...depressingly long. Patrick, the depths of your fandom to Blair Witch (and Lost) makes you do some truly despicable things.

Seriously, though, it takes all of the menace out of the Blair Witch movie by overexplaining a bunch of backstory that was barely mentioned in the movie. And it's hard to care when the protagonist sounds about as scared as Professor Layton solving a matchstick puzzle.

Ah. I didn't get the Condemned port, and didn't know he tried it. I played FEAR not that long ago, though, and didn't have any problems... Hell, didn't really have any framerate problems when it was The New Hotness and it still looked great. Sure kicked the shit out of HL2 which was just a year earlier.

Also didn't know Condemned 2 never came out on PC. OH WELL. We'll have to leave the bumfight reports to Jeff.

HEC-AITOMIX.

@abendlaender said:

@flacracker said:

One day Patrick will play FEAR.

Man fuck you. Now I need to play FEAR again. What a fucking great game.

Yeah, that game was sick! It kind of blew me away at the time. Got so into it.

@lobotomyking: No there is a fix for it. You have to disable HID Compliant devices in the device manager.

@patrickklepek says "Buddy" a ton, is this some kind of regional thing?

My experience, whoever uses the word buddy or calls you that, normally ends up asking for money or a favor...

Good stuff for opening with Dread Out, that's the only game I've ever backed as a crowd funder partly because they offered a functioning demo, so really I just pre-ordered.

Patrick's love for Blair Witch continues to fascinate me. I thought the movie was average at best and I'm a fucking wuss who hates horror movies.

SHIT! Noooooooooo I completely forgot Patrick was doing this!!

Patrick, finish that Blair Witch game on a separate stream, and please have another Spookin' soon. I'm sorry to say I was pretty disappointed with this episode, I really didn't think you'd be replaying an old demo and playing yet another hour of that shit Blair Witch game. I don't know why you ever started playing this game dude, having nostalgia for the movie doesn't mean playing a well-known disaster of a game based off of it was going to be a good idea. Let's see Daylight next week, and if you're still unsure about procedurally generated horror games, you need to do yourself a favor and check out SCP Containment Breach and Vanish, both of which are great - even for just 15 minutes at a time. But as always Patrick, thanks for all the content you create and I look forward to the next Spookin'.

I think Spookin with Scoops is my favorite Giant Bomb feature. Super Professional (Insert Day) is a solid second. Spookin is the only show on Giant Bomb I really feel like I have to watch it live to get my full enjoyment.

And it seems like DreadOut decided they would give you a camera rather than a gun. A different means to the same end.

@handlas said:

@fisk0 said:

@handlas said:

@fisk0 said:

@abendlaender said:

@wired_abyss said:

@abendlaender said:

@flacracker said:

One day Patrick will play FEAR.

Man fuck you. Now I need to play FEAR again. What a fucking great game.

FEAR has some of the best enemy AI and slow-mo hands down.

Yeah, the AI was and still is just mindblowing. It's so sad that AI peaked in 2005 and then went downhill again...

Kinda makes you realize just how little happened over the past generation. F.E.A.R was released just as it was getting started, and still looks and plays better than most games that came out in the 9 years since.

Which FEAR is that? Never played any but I like horror games.. I like shooters... I should like that game.

Still want Patrick to play Cryostasis. Another great FPS horror game. Can't see it happening though.

That's the original F.E.A.R on PC, possibly one of the expansions, but it surely isn't F.E.A.R 2 or F.E.A.R 3 at least, and the console versions had to scale down the graphics quite a bit even back then, I think the PS3 version runs in double pixel mode if I recall correctly (in other words, halved screen resolution). That game had pretty PC high system requirements though, but any desktop PC made in the past 4 years or so should have no issue playing it on the highest settings.

I don't think Cryostasis is for sale anywhere anymore, so that could be hard, yeah. It used to be on GOG and Steam, but was taken down when some publisher went bust in 2011 or so.

Cool maybe I'll play it on PC at some point.

I tried buying Cryostasis again last year and couldn't find it anywhere so you are correct :(. I played it when it originally came out on an pretty old PC and was never able to finish it. Got near the end and it kept crashing. I enjoyed the hell out of what I got to play though.

IIRC FEAR 1 is completely broken on any newer PCs frame rate runs at like 10fps through the whole game for a reason I am to lazy to look up but its difficult to run even on steam idk if they ever patched it.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's an intended aspect, but I'm also pretty sure there's deeper symbolism involved. For starters, the bug in Dreadout seems to be either supernatural or illusory, what with it disappearing into dust when photographed.

The prominence of a large, winged insect echoes the beating "wings" of the mysterious light in the continue screens.

And consider the concrete connection of butterflies/moths and the realm of the dead in some cultures. In Japan, butterflies are said to be manifestations of souls, whether dead, dying, alive, etc... Not sure about the symbolism in Indonesia, but with rich indigenous traditions of animism and beliefs that are labelled "shamanism," I bet there's something to that.

This Blair Witch game is awful. Poor controls, level design, enemy design, fabric design, scare design, story, communication of where to go, pretty much everything. To top it off the main character twerks when standing still.

Damn, dreadout. MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN, i want to/never ever want to play that.

Been waiting for Dreadout to make a return! That game is fucking terrifying.

I feel if any game has to rely on terrible game design to be "scary" it really isnt scary at all. Dreadout looks like a genuinely bad game. I'd rather just play Outlast again.

@flacracker: Personally I think he should just skip to Fear 2 for the school area. Most of the first Fear really isnt scary and is 99% regular FPS.

@flacracker said:

One day Patrick will play FEAR.

Godfuckingdamnit this game is awesome. Best shooting in any game. Phenomenal feeling.

I'm not going to argue that F.E.A.R does a fantastic job on the horror front, but I don't think it's doing a worse job than many of the other games we've seen in recent years through this feature either, only F.E.A.R combines that with really well done mechanics. Amnesia and Penumbra were great, but other than those pretty much all the other horror games in recent years rely just as much on cheap jump scares as F.E.A.R. did, but usually aren't doing as much to earn them, which I think F.E.A.R. often did an alright good job with. While I only really got scared maybe twice while playing F.E.A.R, it always felt tense, even though most of the supernatural encounters couldn't even hurt you.

Waking up and running toward the light is the new valkyrie descending and taking you to Valhalla.

I've been really looking forward to seeing more of (and eventually getting) Dreadout ever since Patrick played the demo in his second? third? installment of Spookin'.

He played Condemned before. It ran like crap on the PC. FEAR actually has the same framerate issues. I think it is fixed by disabling HID deices in the device manager or something. He wasn't really scared by the game. I doubt he would be really scared by FEAR as well, but FEAR just has some amazing gameplay and it is technically a horror game, so why not play it? It is something you need to experience. Also, Condemned 2 is only on consoles.

Man that F.E.A.R. series is only good as a shooter with good A.I. but when it comes to scares it boggles me that people consider this scary when I've had my cat give me more effective jump scares. Than again, the Horror genre was basically dead last generation.

Oh man. I'll be so glad when Patrick gets past Blair witch. Love the feature.

@flacracker: FEAR is dope but I'd like to see him play Condemned. 1 or 2, I guess. I liked the first more despite having technically worse fighting... The supernatural stuff in 2 didn't integrate that well.

@fisk0 said:

@handlas said:

@fisk0 said:

@abendlaender said:

@wired_abyss said:

@abendlaender said:

@flacracker said:

One day Patrick will play FEAR.

Man fuck you. Now I need to play FEAR again. What a fucking great game.

FEAR has some of the best enemy AI and slow-mo hands down.

Yeah, the AI was and still is just mindblowing. It's so sad that AI peaked in 2005 and then went downhill again...

Kinda makes you realize just how little happened over the past generation. F.E.A.R was released just as it was getting started, and still looks and plays better than most games that came out in the 9 years since.

Which FEAR is that? Never played any but I like horror games.. I like shooters... I should like that game.

Still want Patrick to play Cryostasis. Another great FPS horror game. Can't see it happening though.

That's the original F.E.A.R on PC, possibly one of the expansions, but it surely isn't F.E.A.R 2 or F.E.A.R 3 at least, and the console versions had to scale down the graphics quite a bit even back then, I think the PS3 version runs in double pixel mode if I recall correctly (in other words, halved screen resolution). That game had pretty PC high system requirements though, but any desktop PC made in the past 4 years or so should have no issue playing it on the highest settings.

I don't think Cryostasis is for sale anywhere anymore, so that could be hard, yeah. It used to be on GOG and Steam, but was taken down when some publisher went bust in 2011 or so.

Cool maybe I'll play it on PC at some point.

I tried buying Cryostasis again last year and couldn't find it anywhere so you are correct :(. I played it when it originally came out on an pretty old PC and was never able to finish it. Got near the end and it kept crashing. I enjoyed the hell out of what I got to play though.

@parapa: F.E.A.R. 2 was heavily consolized, surely not as good as the original, but stilll pretty good as console shooters go. It opted for more Call of Duty style control and campaign design, whereas the original had a bit more of a Half-life feeling to it. F.E.A.R 2 had some kinda scary moments, and pretty good atmosphere, even though the original did all of that better too.

hec-aitomix