Quick Look: Quadrilateral Cowboy

Super interested in seeing what this is all about. Seems potentially very neat.

Was hoping for this.

20 years in the making!

i really hoped jeff was gonna do the quicklook. he seems like he might have been following the game the closest, and resonates most with his tastes.

?

Hack!

Hudson Hawk shout out!

make a wish on a star baby!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrilateral_Cowboy#Development

Been a few years in development, and I kept hearing the Giant Bomb guys talk about it.

reminds me i should probably play hacknet.

Looks really cool.

Claude Debussy is rad.

Oh hey, it's that game that I've been hearing Jeff talk about since like 2012.

Don't bend the pins!

Awesome!

I want to play this but I am worried this game requires some honest to God coding skills to play so definitely want to see the beasts tackle this.. err.. beast.

Love the Warcraft 2 reference Vinny...

@ogto: Seems like a QL made for Jeff and Brad.

Damn this game has some serious stttyyllllllleee

@convox: *sound of nails scratching a chalkboard*

Those DIN looking plugs make me happy? I don't know why.

this game reminds me of Ryan because he was the first guy I ever heard talk about it :(

real excited to play this tho

I've been waiting a long time for this! I'm a big fan of Brendon Chung's games. I find that he has an impressive attention to detail with a style that I'm always attracted to for some reason.

Very stylish but absolutely not my type of game. Enjoy this one, nerds.

I will most definitely be buying this soon. Might use it to placate my cyberpunk craving while I wait for reviews for Mankind Divided to drop.

Picked this up as soon as it was available on steam, been waiting years for it, hopefully worth the wait!

Gamasutra did a neat interview with Brendan about the influences and development of the game, and if anyone is really interested, the Blendo YouTube channel has some older streams of him working on the game (which had been cool seeing the id tech 4 engine editor).

Hey. This game's actually out! Not that ever doubted it, but it's been a long time.

Now the creators of Barkley Gaiden 2 just need to confirm that they're not dead and their game isn't just vaporware and everything will be right with the world.

Been looking forward to this one, and it's an east coast one too!

Man I didn't really know what was going on or what about it was supposed to be fun 10 minutes in so I bailed. Maybe it's just that they've talked about the game a lot and I don't remember the details, but this could've used more of an introduction for me

Ah... looks... huh.

ALEX IT SAID "FIND" RIGHT THERE THAT'S THE COMMAND TO LOOK FOR WEEVILS

I will say one thing, it has a nuanced, specific melieu the entire game laser-focuses on and scores a bullseye.

Brendan Chung is a mastermind.

Not necc. my kind of game, but I will in time buy and play it. I didn't know what to think of Thirty Flights of Loving, or the other game. I really enjoyed it in one way, but not sure beyond that. This game seems way more concise, just not a walk through some ones world.

But I am willing to roll.

Can anyone tell me what the operatic piece is around 7 minutes in pretty please?

Debussy you say?! Doesn't get crunchier than that. Jam on cowboy!

I think it's just the Christmas song "O holy night" in a foreign language. Not really operatic but kind of sung that way I guess.

Being a guy who loves style, this game has me SO HAPPY. Nobody does style like Blendo.

I find it hard to explain how much joy I get from these games. Even though Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights were so short, I enjoyed them so much. The art, the square headed people, the environmental/organic story telling, the 60's aesthetic, I could go on and on....

Easily one of my favorite developers, and so happy one of my most anticipated games of this year is finally out!!!

So the training area is... a train.

Jesus, Alex. Are you trying to speedrun it or actually show off the game to people who haven't played it?

This looks unfinished. The visuals, I mean. It looks like a proof-of-concept build with hastily and sloppily thrown together placeholder art that was never meant to be shown to the public. The offensively awful colour composition, the lack of aliasing, the ugly blocky models, the cheap smudgy textures (on the surfaces that have textures at all), the fonts, the way object names and outlines look when they show through walls etc. etc. This Chung guy should have found an artist to collaborate with. One-man game development is best left to multitalented people (and even those are better off working with a good team).

Looks very interesting but also is something I'd never want to play in my life. A shame.

@icemael: Or it's a stylistic choice and in line with Blendo Games' previous output to evoke the connection between the game. Of course it can look archaic (it's using Doom 3 engine, so it definitely is archaic tech wise!) and of course you don't have to like it, but the game has a consistent art style that wouldn't be a result of sloppily thrown together assets. Of course hiring someone to do art design for the game could've made it look prettier, but would it have brought enough value to justify the cost? Money is always tight when you're developing games independently.

@icemael It's just the style that he does his first-person games in. I dig it.

If anyone watched this and thought it looked kind of interesting, know that Alex skips over a ton of little things that, to me, make the world really fun to explore. Mainly noticing notes left places or descriptions written on stuff in the world - like how the controls are actually printed on signage around the intro train car and your hideout, instead of an onscreen tutorial popping up. Cool things like that are what make this game extra awesome, and make taking the time to pay attention to the world worth it.

I like the blendo style but the actual game seems not at all interesting. hey it's text commands in fake telnet and the hacking robot is controlled with LOGO! get it? so retro!

30FOL was neat as an "experience" thing, Flotilla was a good game with mechanics. This doesn't really feel like it does either one as well.

I guess the target audience is people who don't have any background in the computer stuff it's invoking -- there do seem to be plenty of reviews that praise the hacking as "fulfilling" (says gamespot). The puzzles seem super-basic if you already know how to make a turtle draw a circle.

Why is it calling the datasette a diskette?

This seems like something Jeff would be more familiar with.

These levels get more complex fast

As someone who spends his work life in a Bash shell, this isn't the escapist entertainment I'm looking for...but I'll probably buy it in a moment of boredom.

That 'deck' reminds me of the old portable 8088 PCs. I had a couple old ones my old high school let me tear apart and mess around with in the early 90s.

Here we go. This looks more like the one in the game, now that I've gone down this rabbit hole. I challenge one to find another more similar to the game model. I bet it is based on something.

My main issue with it is that you're doing these "jobs" in some quasi-matrix environment that just doesn't look that good. It's a weirdly stylized construct of seeing the world through a computer terminal or something, but in evoking that filter for the entirety of every mission you're left standing around in a pretty boring looking location. Compared to the very cool looking environments seen in the short story bits in between missions it's kind of a bummer the rest of the game is played in a wire-mesh code world devoid of any character or detail.

Yeah, I get the feeling that typing "camera2.off(3); wait(5); camera2.off(3);" feels a lot cooler to people who aren't already well-acquainted with scripting or programming. Brad said on the Bombcast that he found it super fun just to enter simple commands like opening a door, and I can totally see why because it's the type of cool-looking stuff that you rarely get the chance to do in games, but all of these "fake-telnet, fake-command-prompt" trappings hold no real novelty to me. I bet real farmers wouldn't find Farming Simulator all that exciting, either, though!