Quick Look: The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit

Bosh

Time to twee: 5 seconds

Jason? Jaaason?

this is a very good little game, imo, and it has made me very curious about what they're up to with LIS2.

Too bad this wasn't a whole playthrough. Still enjoyable, hopefully we'll get a full series with LiS 2 eventually.

"They never get into the hard specifics."

Seems like Alex missed out on quite a bit, actually. They do fully get into exactly what happened to Chris' mom in this game.

yeah. that stuff is pretty buried tho. Also this game explicitly takes place on December 23, 2017

@redhotchilimist said:

Bwahaha this is amazing!

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Can't wait for more Life is Strange.

2017, the year of record players and CRT televisions.

Hopefully we'll get some more hot takes on Final Fantasy The Spirits Within

I guess so? I mean, it's just in the Shed. You do have to get the key and solve one puzzle but it's pretty easy.

Man, I feel bad for that kid and for his dad. Alcoholism sucks and can make good people do terrible things.

I know Beast played Life is Strange but since Beast did the Wreckfest QL, I was really into the idea of having the other team covering "one of the other team's games" so I was really hoping West was doing the QL for this game.

This game was only two hours, but it still broke me.

Really nice that this is free.

Captain Fuckin' Spirit

I really enjoyed this. Totally played into a lot of my early childhood with the world of imagination. I'm very, very interested in how they'll move forward from this. The ending is very interesting and I hope they don't leave the superhero motifs and examinations with his childhood; especially with pop culture so centered around ideas of superheroics, a young adult who is trying to live out life in the way that he thinks a superhero would has the potential to be really compelling.

My childhood stuffed toy is called Polar, he's a polar bear and I've had him since I was a newborn baby. I love him dearly.

Captain Spirit is pretty good, and certainly worth your time for free. Its been decades since I had imaginary games I played but this brought the memories flooding back.

This seems just as bad as the other Life Is Strange games. I guess I was expecting this one to be better since children imagination has more potential than a Butterfly Effect rip-off.

Sure, but it doesn't seem like he went back to do the stuff he missed after getting the ending, so you know, it's easy to miss any one specific thing if you don't know what's going to trigger the end.

If anyone's interested, Patrick Kelpek wrote an excellent article about this game over at Waypoint.

This game has me very excited for LiS 2, specifically because of what it did differently from LiS. The original LiS encourages you to act empathetically towards the characters and generally see the best in them. This game pulls you into a murkier place where being understanding isn't enough.

For a free episode this is much better than I expected. High hopes for LiS 2

The Awesome Adventures of Sufjan Stevens!

@vinny@ybbaaabby The color levels on the video are really washed out. I think either the PC or your recording equipment is only set for limited dynamic range, 16-235, instead of a full 0-255.

versus

Come for the Sufjan, Stay for the game, which is the video game equivalent of Sufjan.

@thisiseric: This has been an issue with Giant Bomb videos for so long, it's hard to believe they haven't fixed it. Have they at least ever commented on it?

You'd think especially with those OLEDs they love so much Giant Bomb would appreciate a good true black....

I hate this game with all my black little heart..

SCOREBOARD!

That kid looks like a young Frank, the RV drug dealer, from the first one.

The game takes place during December 2016, no? On his dads computer he's been looking at tickets for Comic Con for early Jan 2017.

The QR code on the comic store flyer contains scan data that says "A ragged colt may make a good horse." Just so you know.

It's staggering and imo, a bit lazy.

That's for the kid, in the living room is a huge flat screen. Also this family is not exactly rolling in it.

Even though it's free I think I have to watch an LP of this.

The PC version comes with Denuvo...DRM for a free game...

The kid in this looks way too old for coloring books and toys. It would have been more realistic if he was on Fortnite and Chatroulette. And rockstar for breakfast.

As someone who doesn't like Life is Strange, Xbox indie showcase music and kids...

That console might as well have been a launch PS2, looked pretty close it.

I liked it but I really hope it's going to be a true sequel to Life Is Strange and not just some references.

@redhotchilimist said:

so powerful

I could have done with a little less Sufjan, but overall I really enjoyed this little prologue. The cell phone unlock code is a real bastard though. Also, many of the documents and photos place the setting in the current day.

@mathey said:

@redhotchilimist said:

so powerful

Haha perfection. Well Done!

This was a promising start. Let's just say I have some experience with some of the things they are portraying in this episode and it was all handled better than I expected. Hopefully that continues in the main game and there's not as much of the wandering around doing kid stuff. Character interactions are what makes or breaks this kind of game and there was very little of that here.

@brianp: How many times does Alex say "precious"?

@redhotchilimist: Nailed it.

@therealseaman: @pimanrules: @thisiseric:

Maybe it's not a bug with GB's video output and more of an issue of personal taste. In the screenshot comparison posted in these comments, I MUCH prefer the top, "washed out" screen as much more realistic in terms of light-diffusion over the "we live in a cave and can't afford interior lighting" bottom-screenshot.

It's a typical color space problem due to incorrect settings. It's easy to replicate this scenario by using 16-235 on a PC monitor instead of 0-255. I think the other screenshot is a little too contrasty but it's on the right path.

Maybe some people like it better, though it's objectively wrong and you will be compromising the visuals. If it's washed out like this, it looks ugly but it's not as game breaking as running 0-255 on a TV, which crushes blacks and can make it very unpleasant to play games.

My TV is HDR (which I think can run full range), but the rule of thumb is 0-255 on a PC monitor and 16-235 on a TV, this will give you the correct image and you can fine tune it using in-game brightness settings. Running the incorrect setting is going to obscure the visuals to varying degrees of severity and cannot be fixed with in-game settings or display settings.

Consoles will automatically detect and should use the right setting, PC can vary as apps can independently use different color spaces (my VLC wrongly used 16-235 on my PC monitor) but most of them do use the right setting. My TV has the option for 0-255 and 16-235 so I'm guessing that for HDR panels you can use 0-255 without problems.

TL;DR - Run the correct mode and fine tune the brightness/contrast using in-game settings or elsewhere, this way you're not losing out on important shades of black/grey or making the content too dark beyond repair.

@dasakamov: It's not a bug, it's an incorrect setup. Older LCD monitors were not equipped to deal with the full color range so options were created that narrowed the range. Some devices default to Limited Dynamic Range for compatibility. True white changes from #FFFFFF to #EBEBEB and true black changes from #000000 to #101010. Regardless of the color (red #FF0000), the color beyond the threshold will be erased and detail will be lost (#EB1010). That is objectively worse, especially when you are trying to create video content. Here is an example of the difference (assuming your display is correctly set).

Gallery

I just grabbed a random video off YouTube to show the change. I posted in an older thread with these images from the Civ QL and another random video on YouTube but that was nearly two years ago.

You are going from 16,777,216 colors to 10,503,459, AKA more than a third of colors are lost. There isn't a reasonable scenario where lower is better, aside from a monitor not being able to display it and maybe lower file sizes which isn't the case because the videos GBE puts out are 8bit color.

omg the sufjan stevens track at the beginning!!