Spookin' With Scoops: 05/22/2014

I like penis.

What

Gather the children up, and watch this one along with your family. This is a very special video.

This has made a dent(ate) on my psyche.

You all came here for the polydong... admit it.

Absolutely.

I didn't get chance to catch this live but... whaaa?

... yeah :(

NAH, SON. CAN'T DO IT.

Will every comment be about the dick (or lack there of)?

Undoubtedly, yes.

Ain't nothin' wrong with some polydong.

outlast? more like outcast(ration anxiety)

So the D-train has left the station, choo choo!!. I am deeply sorry, but I felt obligated at this point.

Wish I was here live to see this.

If it was me on the table, I would have been fully erect.

---

Seriously though, does Whistleblower qualify as another piece of DLC that's better than the main game (like Bioshock 2 had)?

... Alright, I'll step on this landmine. Anyone got a timestamp for the polydong?

@mden2013: Around 1h03 things become interesting.

Wait... How the fuck does an M rated video game get away with showing a full-on dong shot like that? ESRB must have phoned this one's rating in.

I'm guessing because of the angle of the shot obscures most of the dong. GTAV had full on dong too that occurred during one of the random roadside events. It not being shown in a sexual situation probably played into it being allowed.

@cabrit_sans_cor said:

Why does a non-erect penis immediately mean AO? There's nothing inherently sexual or offensive about it.

The better question is why shoving a guy's head violently into a table saw doesn't net it an AO rating. That's the more interesting question.

This DLC seems way better than the base game. Hopefully that means Red Barrel learned some things and can make a good standalone game next time.

@wemibelec90: The answer is cultural standards.

A sex scene in Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy over here) gets the game an AO, despite the fact that it's not very explicit. Female nudity in games is something that is just recently being introduced, but even then they can only really get away with showing breasts.

Now, I know it's kind of shitty, but full-on male nudity is seen as much more objectionable than full-on female nudity in American media (I feel like it might have something to do with latent homophobia, but I digress). In film, if you have a shot where a dick is clearly visible, it better be a very short cut (I'm talking a couple seconds max) unless you want to get an NC-17. Is that right? No, but I was under the impression that sexual content and nudity in games was treated much harsher than it was in film.

It just surprises me, is all.

@cabrit_sans_cor: Sorry, I thought you were offended and not simply surprised. It's happened before, most notably in the DLC for GTA IV. I'd like to think that maybe the ESRB is a bit more lenient than the MPAA, which is why it has slid by the few times it has occurred. If so, that's a great thought; I'd like to have the ability to show a bit of nudity (when necessary) without everyone losing their minds over it.

So that's how babies are made!

The Groom sequence is extremely effective at being disturbing. No doubt. There's plenty of violence in Outlast to begin with, often graphic, gory violence, but sexualizing it really takes it to Squicky town. I am not sure if I'm thrilled about that or its implications, but its likely the chief reason this DLC was memorable.

That aside, I definitely think they provided better character hooks and resolution to the game than the main plot did. They give the protagonist a more compelling motive, present you a quite hate-able face for the Evil Corporation running things early on, and deliver a pretty great capstone at the end.

As far as the depiction of the mentally ill as Monsters Who Want to Eat/Rape You, I agree that its way too easy to treat people with these conditions as subhuman or threatening in mass media. The most popular routes are to either look down on them as broken pathetic wretches (Renfield, Ophelia, Bertha from Jane Eyre) OR to exalt them as brilliant-if-twisted masterminds (see: any number of mad scientists, Hannibal, the Joker). Outlast doesn't do anything to change this, and exploits a lot of old stereotypes to tell its horror story.

Having said that, as a person who has had loved ones who have spent time in psychiatric wards and who himself struggles with mental illness, I found the vast majority of situations and characters in this game too cartoonishly monstrous to take them seriously. The character of Chris Walker (the Big Motherfucker who chases you in the main game) exemplifies this; he's comic book massive, has white eyes, and has ripped off his own nose and lips just to make him even less human looking.

He also doesn't behave like a real person, mentally ill or otherwise; he just meanders around looking imposing and gross and ripping off heads. The fact that he's supposed to be a war veteran (psycho war vets are a pretty common Hollywoodism) is pretty tasteless, but his other characteristics are caricatured into the realm of the unreal and supernatural. Same kinda goes for the majority of the monsters haunting the asylum; literally faceless, non-specifically crazy criminals you aren't meant to view as human or worth caring about.

Playing Outlast is a little like visiting a neighborhood house of horrors with a "crazy people" theme; tacky, prone to jump scares, and trying a little too hard.

I watched this last night. Great episode and I may get the DLC just to support this developer as I haven't gotten around to playing it yet but now I know all of it. I like what they do and it feels like they learned a lot between the main game and this DLC.

There is a lot of points in here where Patrick discusses a dislike of video games using psychological issues as a crutch as if it's a serious trope in video games. I have expressed this many times, but I have my own issues including PTSD and Agoraphobia.

I have played a lot of games, and I simply do not see this ground swell of video games using psychological issues as a stereotype for villains. I've never seen that nor seen a use of it even to suggest exploitation.

I wonder how many games can be listed with psychological issues that merely focus on the issue as scary and not on anything else. I can name a few that use psychological issues in some manner, and I found none of them to be offensive. Most are just using it for a map/ambiance type and have nothing to actually say about mental conditions.

This recent pop up of this supposed problem is not one that is backed by a lot of passion, but hearing Patrick mimic it here with no real basis for why he feels that way, sort of irks me more than the supposed problem itself.

It merely makes me wonder how it's a problem? There is barely any games that use this trope (which is found more in film than in video games) and the majority of games that use it only use it for ambiance and not to focus on the conditions themselves. It has never felt disparaging or like it was painting all psychological conditions in any light whatsoever.

That's just me though and I felt inclined to unload my thoughts on it. I don't know why. It kind of irks me, but at the same time I don't have a problem with Patrick or his intent, but I only ask that people make up their own minds on issues based on actual problems and not try to make some up. In this particular case I feel like it's unwarranted.

@cornbredx: I can totally agree with what you're saying here. While I could understand the idea of being opposed to portraying the mentally ill as villainous, the way Outlast does it makes it clear that whatever these people have become, they're the victims. Most of them don't even attack you - several even help you out. It's people like Blaire (the suited executive who throws the DLC protagonist in the asylum in the first place) and Wernicke (who made all of the horror possible) that are the real villains, and they seem mentally sound if not incredibly immoral.

Plus, the notes and documents throughout the game (and the physical scarring on most of the incarcerated) show that whatever Murkoff was up to was something pretty horrifying, enough to completely break a lot of these people. The Groom is the guy who begs Waylon for help at the beginning of Whistleblower, and he didn't seem to be what he became later on. In the base game, Miles even notes sympathy for Chris Walker at one point.

Given that the Walrider is ambiguously supernatural (Wernicke claims it's only nanomachines but I honestly don't trust him at his word), I'm led to think a little of cosmic horror-induced madness like you'd seen in a run-of-the-mill Lovecraft story. While the asylum and the inmates can be pretty scary, it's not them in themselves that are frightening. Well, the jump scares can be, but what I mean is that the most horrific part of Outlast's story is what was done to all these people and the fact that this big corporation managed to get away with it for quite some time.

lol these streams always scare me XD but I have found a stratagy... when ever tension is building I play Guile's theme in the background :D makes Partick running away and hiding really epic XD

P.S. Got to agree with all of what Partick said about horror games using people with mental health issues as 'crazy evil people', at some point there is going too far the "come to Daddy" guy being a clear example of that...

I know its a long shot but I would love to hear Partick do an interview a developer of a horror game and ask them if they feel this is becoming a issue and ways to not deionise people with mental health problems?

I chose the wrong moment in this video to start eating a hotdog.

I don't think I've seen an erect one in any piece of media that is not porn.

This just seems better than the main game in every way. That scene might be the most disturbing shit I've seen in a video game, holy shit!

Do you really want your mom tuning in on this, Patrick? Really?

Well, here we go.

Edit: Oh my god. I don't know what to say. That was...intense to say the least.

I don't know about other people but I found "the sequence" phenomenally effective and disturbing. That character was so obviously twisted that what he did wasn't exploitative in a way that, like, Tomb Raider can be construed as (e. g. torture porn). And, man, castrating that guy with the machete just...cringe!

@brightside: it hurts to talk about it :/

All I could think of while "the scene" was happening was the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode, "Dickesode." I needed to think funny thoughts. But I'm glad we live in a time that this can be created, shared and played no matter how graphic.

"UMMMM"

That was crazy as balls!

What we saw was on the razors edge at that point, but it wasn't as cut and dry as all that. If it hadn't of been for the tip-off earlier I don't think we could have been so ballsy about it now.

@brightside: it hurts to talk about it :/