Quick Look: Ghostship Aftermath

On one hand, this game looks terrible beyond words.

On the other, the idea is good, and it's super impressive for a one-man project.

On the third, escape-poo-covered hand, it made for a fantastic QL.

God damn Giantbomb East has really become the only reason to remain a subscriber to Giantbomb. I'm incredibly happy over the direction GBeast has taken in distancing itself form the Callofduty/Battlefield-bro nuts that Giantbomb used to swing off of as of late.

Well, it actually really depends on the engine that the game is using. If there's native support for a "freeze time" function (to actually stop things going "in the background" while you are browsing a menu), it's easy to make a "normal" pause system, but otherwise it might be easier to "remember" the last checkpoint, and resume from there the game. In any case, going for the later option is still pretty shitty game design, and taking the time to code everything that's necessary for a "normal pause" should be a priority in any project.

I'm unsure of whether or not we're allowed to post links in the comments so I'll hold off but there's a really good article on NASA's website about survival in a vacuum. Just google "Human Body in a Vacuum" and it should be the first link. The best part is when they describe an accident at the Johnson Space Center in the mid 60s when a suit failed while being tested under extremely low pressure and the man recounts what he felt before loosing consciousness.

featuring Dan "Meat n' Cheese" Ryckert

okay how hard could it have possibly been to make the heartrate monitor number fluctuate a little bit. really now.

edit-- wait. wait wait wait just a second here. when Drew shot some guys the heart rate went down... to 69. Wait, no now it's going down again. That number isn't connected to the heartrate monitor is it? That's like hitpoints or something. What the hell man i'm so confused. >__>

Yeah, the first couple of times it happened I put it off as "Yeah, well, we all have blind spots." At this point it's become a pretty jarring pattern, especially from someone who is supposed to have been college educated. It's like the only things he knows about are professional wrestling, not eating most foods, and video games (though he has some fairly large blind spots there too).

Hey, he's still a good foil in these videos, but I'm finding it more and more difficult to respect his opinions.

I feel like dan is learning so much about the world just by being around drew. seems like minnesota is some anthropological black hole where only few escape, but when they do, it's like stepping from the 19th century into the 21st.

DAN THE BUTTS

@pkmango7: That's the bit that stood out to me too!

*presses escape*

OH NO! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?

"This is also not how people read"

LOL

Pretty sure Dan was nursing a hangover that day in his Space Exploration 101 course :) It's actually kind of refreshing to have him around to take some of the starch out of the goddamned erudite eggheads that populate the GB staff. ( I say that with love btw)

This might be worth checking out when the Oculus Rift is released.

@stryker1121: Erudite? That's egghead talk! You're one of them!

Get him!

@triumvir said:

@mooseymcman said:

@stryker1121: Erudite? That's egghead talk! You're one of them!

Get him!

Hee hee. You guys did not let me down!

Man, Dan really has some gaps in his general knowledge.

It uses UDK, i.e. free version of Unreal Engine 3. Texture load in is a giveaway but I confirmed from the developer's videos. UDK games can typically pause...

---

I wonder if developers of stuff like this know their game is bad. Like do they just have blinders on because it's been a passion project for years and they can't see how it's flawed, or do they know and just cynically dump it on the market anyway?

Man that is a janky game. The fact that the game needs to switch to another scene to show the menu is a real amatuer mistake. The game also does a very poor job explaining the perma-death mechanic and compensating for repeated playthroughs.

It feels like this game should have been marked as Early Access. If you check the Steam page right now they mention that the VR support is not implemented yet and their announcements page reads like an Early Access game, promising fixes and eliciting feedback.

Now I want a video/podcast where Brad teaches Dan about space, physics and maybe even mayonnaise.

Also that pause thing has to a be a bug, because that's really the worst. Game seems cool enough otherwise (for an Oculus game).

@danryckert have you never seen Total Recall? What happens at the end is because of decompression/lack of air. Here's a video. It's a 100% scientifically accurate.

He explodes afterwards by the way.

For people interested in what actually will happen (interestingly enough you'll survive for about 1 1/2 minutes): What actually happens when you get sucked out of an airlock.

You some kind of space cowboy or something?

@chilibean_3: I'VE BEEN FOUND OUT.

See you...

Drew is riding the great ship Alexis?

Too hot for TV!

well, at least Drew apologized at the end, lol... *shrug*

Disappointed they didn't show the beginning of the game when you cut all the passengers on the ship in half with a thin wire.

I find it offensive that somebody wants 20 bucks for this.

It's awful and janky and disgraceful and... I kinda want to see more of this. I don't want to play it, mind you. But I could watch more.

Can't hold your breath, the pressure in your lungs would be way too intense, all the water in your mouth would boil as well, but not in a burning way, just in a weird bubbly way. You'd likely be ok for 3 seconds though... As long as you didn't try to hold your breath.

@newfangled: lol, you'd think that'd be premium content!

I was getting concerned after the death... Drew was losing his mind! I wasn't sure he was going to recover.

Oh okay so the permadeath thing is not a glitch? I went to google to see if maybe they hit a bug or something. hahahaha. edit- oh okay i see this gets addressed in the video too. ahahahaha.

Ghost don't eat and now we know ghost don't lay eggs. You learn a lot about ghost on Giant Bomb.

those damn escape poos

So this game is basically Ace Ventura in space.

Well, he can pull off some great pranks...so there's that as well I guess...

I think Drew and Dan are my new favorite combo for quicklooks.

The only thing I can think of is that when the developers spawned this abomination from asset-store hell they accidentally attached the default 'revert to checkpoint' action to the resume game button.

There's merit in his full admittance that the people around him know much more than he does, and that he seems to be willing to learn and admit his own biases.

In the words of the impression Horatio Sanz did of Gene Shalit on SNL: Ghost Ship? More like a steaming pile of Ghost Ship.

I enjoyed it when it came out and still enjoyed it when it watched it again about a year ago on Netflix.

Trainspotting is easily my favorite Peter Boyle movie.

I was willing to give the developer kudos for at least completing the exhaustive process of creating a game (wonky as it is), but after hearing that he attacked his potential customers and created fake accounts to up-rate his own game on Metacritic? That kind of developer deserves support from no one.

Also, I thought it was both charming and a bit alarming that Dan kept insisting that a "ghost ship" had to be populated with ghosts (that you shoot with a space gun, no less). From Wikipedia: "A ghost ship, also known as a phantom ship, is a ship with no living crew aboard. . .a real derelict found adrift with its crew missing or dead, like the Mary Celeste.^[1][2] The term is sometimes used for ships that have been decommissioned but not yet scrapped."

Caution: Beware of Escape Poo

I feel as though I really didn't understand Event Horizon when I saw it as a teenager. Drew and Dan make it sound pretty awesome, when all I remember is Jellyfish

Wow, that checkpointing...making games alone is hard kids..

This statement makes no sense! But sure!

hahaha! the text scrolls down on the screens!

Oh there just MUST be some more Dan/Drew QL:s in the future. I want more dumb Ryckert questions for Drew on science, and I want more the two of them just laughing at stupid shit (they seem to be really clicking in everything they do). Maybe even having their own video series? "Dan and Drew Does Dumb Stuff".

If Gravity taught me one thing it's that space is scary as fuck even without ghosts.

I'm pretty sure other games have done the horrible practice of loading a checkpoint on resume. I can't remember which ones though.

I could not stop laughing during this Quick Look! This has to be the worst game I've seen in a long time.