Endurance Run: Shenmue - Part 16

Best episode yet.

Holy hell that was hilarious!

this is a+ content

This is a moment for the books.

As for the issues with waiting, I would raise a couple points:

1. This isn't a personal playthrough of the game, they're doing it for entertainment. Vinny has mentioned numerous times before he plays differently at home than he does on video, where he's conscious about talking to NPCs or exploring a place to avoid dead air (He can't start an improptu jam session over QTE excite.)

2. From just watching the ER, I think Shenmue is probably discouraging him from exploring more than it's helping. While impressive that you can ask every npc in the game about the current objective, it is also the only thing you can ask about, and is constantly directing you to the main plot. Vinny seems to want to follow the cues at every corner, only to then be told to wait.

Shenmue seems like a fascinating experiment, but if you're not able to get into it wholesale, it breaks in somewhat core ways.

They should just release this episode as an mp3.

It was unfortunate that they didn't initiate this scene in yesterday's episode before 4pm, else this could have been avoided. In this episode they could have gone to Bunkaido Antiques and purchased all the move scrolls, trained moves in the parking lot (which levels up the moves, increasing their damage), bought food for and fed the cat, tried to win a Sega Saturn game at the Tomato store, played the arcade games to beat high scores, phoned friends for unique phone-only conversations, phoned and met master chen at warehouse no.8 to translate the 2 mysterious scrolls they found, filled out a specific capsule toy collection, visit the Fortune Teller (who was only unavailable last episode, because Ryo was in the process of saving money for a ticket) for a gambling lucky number, then visiting the slothouse and using the machine that corresponds to that number for better odds. You can call it window dressing, but that's part of the experience, and whether you're the type who digs the experience of existing in this virtual environment, or doesn't, is going to be entirely subjective.

HA, fuck this game.

This is one of the greatest videos to go on the site,

people who are so upset at this episode boy oh boy you just dont get it but I hope you figure it out

I love this because we are watching Vinny play Shenmue. He's just playing as it presents itself to him. No guides, no help from chat, just playing the game as if it just came out.

I would understand people being frustrated if this was a walkthrough, or him playing with a FAQ. I even understand being frustrated, because you feel like he's misrepresenting the game you love. But come on, this game is obtuse as hell. Take the Nozomi thing. He has talked to her several times, and it's clear to him that he's missing something, but in no way does it tell him to try calling her. All it has to do is have some dialog, where she tells him "Yo dog, maybe you should call me sometime", just to present him with that option. Of coarse he's going to think calling people is plot specific, because the only time the phone has come up was plot related.

I played Shenmue when it came out, and immediately stopped when I got frustrated with the waiting. This game is not for everyone, and that's alright. It's fine at what it does, but suffers for it too. I do not think Shenmue is a good game, but can see what people get from it, and respect it for what it was.

@xdot: "Hey we're fusing Satan!"

"Have fun kids."

@shtinky: The virtual environment is pretty rich with things to do, but I would bring up that they're not just ignoring all those prompts of side objectives, but ran into gameplay roadblocks that discouraged them.

All the fights thus far have beens stomps, and gave them no indication that they need to train. They bought cat food, but didn't have a prompt to use it, or were at the wrong time and place. They attempted to translate the scrolls, but none of the Chinese speaking people they talked to hinted to it being martial arts terminology they were unfamiliar with, just that it was wierd.

A realistic virtual world is well and good, but without some game-like direction given, have to accept that some things will go unknown, like a real world it's representing.

Vinny's Ryo is only focused on avenging his father, making fun of children, and yelling at Tom.

@shtinky: This question is directed at everyone, not just you: do any of the things you listed sound like fun things to do?

"I'll call you first thing tomorrow!"

Best. Game. Ever.

Vinny & Alex you really don't need to keep doing this to yourselves. Seriously if this ended the endurance run for Shenmue here it'd be a mercy killing. There are so many games you could be playing that are good material for an ER but this has long run its course. God bless you saints.

"What a waste of time!"

Shenmue encapsulated

@joedangerous: nothing stops the endurance run!

There's only a few times in the game where there's not an immediate thing you can to to advance the story during the day, and that was only because they visited the store at the beginning of the day. There's also other optional side things they can do, and the game looks less impressive today.

Just enjoy the videos they are making and stop trying to convince other people of your opinions.

If you don't like the game fine, but complaining about it doesn't really make a difference here.

Man, I hope this endurance run becomes just an hour hanging with this guys.

Ryo the most gullible videogame protagonist

I give this a Fireboylt+

This was way, way, WAY better than ANYTHING Shenmue could have ever given us. Thanks guys.

What am I doing with my life?

What delicious irony. This whole time the game has been punishing them for trying to mainline the story, and now they have to burn a whole day for taking a few minutes to do some side stuff.

Man, this game is BAD.

I think this is my favourite episode.

I would pay ALL the premium membership monies to have Vinny play guitar and sing me Sesame Street songs for a day.

Regardless of whether people think the side content in shenmue is good or bad, the tenacity of Vinny and crew in not engaging in it for good or ill is pretty amazing XD.

@johnymyko: *feels faint, fans himself*

If anyone would like to hear/see more of Vinny playing his guitar check out his Extra Life stream he did the last time Giantbomb did their thing

great content comes from hosts' misery. I love this, thank youuu

The thing is, most people who say they loved this game....... THEY NEVER PLAYED IT! They just jump on this weird bandwagon where it's cool to like old obscure games and then they pretend that they were there playing it on day one.

I got to play it around the time it came out on my friends Dreamcast when I was 13. It was so bad, we both hated it, found it was boring, we thought the voice acting sucked and there was nothing to do. That was back then, Halo 1 just came out, he got an Xbox and then gave me his Dreamcast for free lol. However the controller stopped working so I never played it again.

Bravo Dan, Vinny and Alex!

"Ryo's an idiot."

Yyyyyup.

I want to think he grows smarter in II. At least he doesn't give all his money to the blatant scam people as soon as he steps off the boat.

I always enjoyed the "burn some time" aspect as there were things I was genuinely interested in doing (collecting capsules/prices, beating high scores, training moves up that might haunt them later for not doing) that fit in just right. They don't translate well to an endurance run that is trying to complete the game as quickly as they can, though.

Also, just some bad luck that the "3 or 4 hours" from the previous episode didn't happen before the "come back tomorrow" chunk.

Nothing stops the endurance run - except having to play Shenmue for 25 minutes.

Bummer episode for me, but overall ER's are the best <3

HA! It's even funnier because when I realized what had happened I started strumming on my ukelele. My fingertips kind of got fucked up from work so I can't play comfortably on metal guitar strings at the moment. I give Dan a lot of credit for trying but holy hell... I thought I was bad at singing. This to me sounds like the proto-typical drunken karaoke voice. At least Alex kept himself baritone. Comparatively Vinny has the voice of an angel. And yet none of them sound as good as Brad.

As funny as this was... I don't know guys. Like I've commented in the past I have not played this game in a long time but there HAD to be more stuff to do in this game than just wait around. I associate Endurance Runs in the the past with game stuff that I pay attention to and this is probably the first one where portions of episodes I push to the background while I do something else. This episode is putting me in a real existential crisis. This should have honestly been the actual end of this series because you guys failed to endure. You reached that magical breaking point where you'd rather do anything other than play video games on camera. I can't wait for this feature to continue but is this like...the end of Giant BEast... as a concept? Or is this just a very bad video game?

Gotta agree with Dan about Smashburger. Olive Oil fries for the win.

Also, that Shake Shack line only goes away during shitty weather, or winter, though even that's not a guarantee.

Never before has there been as great a disparity between the quality of a game and it's GB video. Thank you guys!

Vintage Giant Bomb!

The moves come up so rarely that sinking time into them seems like a waste of time, especially since Vinny just button mashes anyways. They bought food for the cat, couldn't figure out how to feed it so they gave up on that. Pouring money into a bunch of stuff they don't need in the hope that they get a RNG drop that isn't useful seems like a bad idea, given that in all likelihood they'll probably have to start saving up more money soon. The phone system is kind of obtuse and I would've never guessed you could do that, and I doubt they do either. They tried going to a bunch of Chinese people they knew and couldn't translate the scrolls, and so assumed that you can't do that yet. The game didn't make that clear at all and made it seem that the Fortune Teller is locked behind some in-game process, and even then that seems convoluted and opaque such that, like most of this stuff, you would only figure it out if you were straining the boundaries of the game in the vain hope of finding something to do. When it comes down to it, none of that seems particularly fulfilling anyways, which makes me wonder why they bloated out the story so much to force you to do this stuff.

Wow this episode is something!

edit: I'm crying at work. the singing was absolutely brilliant.

Expanding the melee mechanics and moves list are part of the game's plot and atmosphere. There's a lot of games where expanding stats aren't necessary but are still possible. They just happened to walk into that store the one time that they get that message about not being able to spend money, other wise they would have had much clearer dialogue. Acquiring money when they need is not a big issue so spending it wouldn't have really matter. Many games have collectables so saying "they don't need" something doesn't really make sense. They game has context help menus for almost everything, even if they didn't read the very small and helpful manual. They looked at a map one time, and didn't even notice what they were looking for was in the center of it.

This was very impressive to a lot of people at the time, even if some didn't like it then, and it doesn't look impressive today. Hardly any other game did this kind of open world back then, so comparing it to newer games doesn't really make sense.

I can't wait until the next episode when (spoilers) their ticket gets eaten and they realize they have to get a job.

It will be a true test of endurance.

Hopefully Shenmue 3 doesn't figure out that Free to Play games charge people to speed up the game clock and follow suit.

Shenmue deserves this kind of treatment

I don't think lying about having played a game is much of a thing. Shenmue was an ambitious game that tried lots of new weird and impressive stuff. Some of us appreciated those elements more than we were bothered by its flaws and shortcomings.

Being forced to wait around is blatantly bad game design, Yu Suzuki and friends admitted as much by letting players skip time in Shenmue II, but I don't recall feeling annoyed by it, probably because I actually liked playing the minigames and whatnot. Just walking around town, seeing where people appeared and went to, checking up on them, was a novel aspect of the game that I enjoyed poking at. Shenmue was like a quirky precursor to open world simulation, immersive sims, from and about Japan, and I found all that stuff fascinating.

There are more days of waiting coming right up (unless there are other paths to take through) :)

Just played this myself.