Choose Our Own Adventure!: 10/14/2015 (Life is Strange)

@alex Mad fucking props for coming up with Grey Gardens and Harlan County as your two examples when someone mentions documentaries.

Played up to about 3/4 through the first episode of this when it first came out and promptly uninstalled it.

Now that episode 5 is apparently (and finally) round the corner I can install the whole thing and binge it over the space of a weekend.

This game makes me want to vom (intended), but i watch for the beast not the atrocity they happen to be playing.

I vote for more of this!

Keep playing!

They finished it a month ago.

Oregon!

Man Alex was ON FIRE on this show.

Really enjoyed watching them play this. Not somthing I would normally seek out but I would totally watch them play some more.

Glad to see you are playing this; I just finished episode 3 and it goes some places. Looking forward to see if our choices differ.

I actually think Warren is pretty great, its interesting to see the 3 of you react to him differently.

I just started playing this the day before so perfect timing.

Glad you guys are covering this, I think it was the QL that piqued my interest in the game- however I did wait until ep4 had come out to actually buy it. I like this game a whole lot.

@drew327: I wish Max acknowledged in her journal or something that Warren is coming on SUPER STRONG at all times. They just wrote it real weird. When people bring it up, she kinda plays it off like she's not sure if he's really interested in her. Maybe teens are that clueless?

I really, really like that Warren's last text in that barrage of texts is "Don't ignore this message." It's the best. He's completely out of gas, but he just keeps messaging. I'm so glad that Vinny, Alex, and Austin read through that, it was great.

Love the video, keep it going guys.

Have you ever wished you could rewind time? Anyway there's this game...

I like Warren :( They make a cute couple.

Main character plays Crosses on the guitar? I'm sold.

Hah! I did exactly that myself :-) Roll on Ep5, so I can similarly binge...

Great video! Life is Strange is without a doubt going to be my game of the year. Really hope you guys keep playing this. It would be heartbreaking for me if you get a ways in, and then suddenly stop because people stopped voting for it.

Keep going, leave any cynicism at the door and enjoy the game for the wonderful experience that it is.

I noticed I wasn't the only one to be a bit perplexed at the occasionally needlessly shitty dialogue. TV shows that feature teenage characters suffer from this problem as well. I mean seriously, how hard is it to get a bunch of actual teenagers into the writers room for a day or two, sit them down, explain the characters and the situations they're in for each scene and have them give their input w/r/t how they would speak in said situations? They wouldn't even have to pay the fuckers; just arrange it as day out with the schoolteachers as part of a drama class or something.

@omgfather said:

I like Warren too. Some people are reading it as "Max is obviously kinda brushing off his advances, he should lay off", but I think they're trying to write at "She's really oblivious, or just doesn't know how to respond because she hasn't dated much, or she's just super shy" or something. For what it's worth, the Max/Warren thing is ultimately kind of a background thing, since there are other more important things going on.

@stevewinwood: I had this on my Steam wishlist before it came out but never thought it would be a contender for GOTY list for me. Always seemed to be a fun little game that i could play during the summer lull but now i cant wait for the last EP.

Yeah, the writing is close. Like, they ALMOST understand how to use "hella", but not really. Sure, broadly speaking, "hella" could mean "a lot of", but you can't just do a ctrl+f in your script and replace all teen dialogue of "a lot of" with "hella". When Chloe says "you're gonna be in hella more trouble", it sounds insane. They were going for "you're gonna be in a lot more trouble", but "hella" is really used more for emphasis than to indicate...magnitude? All the ways they're misusing teen slang make me then have to really think about the proper usage of it harder than I ever would.

It's crazy that the English language voice actors wouldn't just call out some of the weird writing in the VO booth and ask the voice director if they could change the line. I swear Ashly Burch (Chloe) is young enough to know that a lot of her slang is being slightly misused and I feel like she easily could've fixed the line reads if she was allowed to do a slightly different version of it.

Vinny's crazy, high school bathrooms are totally that grungy. Though maybe not so dramatically lit.

Yeah, they obviously had someone do research to try to get the setting right, since the studio is in no way located in the northwest US where the game is set. It's weird that Square Enix couldn't focus test the script with a handful of west coast American teenagers just to make sure it sounds remotely natural. I also kind of wonder how their research even worked that they picked up all this slang but got so much of the context wrong of how you can use that slang.

Or maybe they did focus test it and the teenagers employed the negative-participant "screw you effect" intentionally giving the writers really lame-sounding lines. It's what my then-friends and I might have done at that age.

I'll watch GBeast do anything and enjoy it, but I feel like I'm missing something with this one.The bad voice acting, and the alien looking people are kinda turning me off to this.

@cactusapple: DONTNOD got monked by that teen 'tude.

I feel like I'm the only person who's not completely in love with this. Life is Strange is a really really good game, but ... I kinda think the crew is at their best when they're playing less good games. There's more of a chance for them to make their own fun.

Although I did really love the Until Dawn run.

@bocckob said:

So far Victoria is a poor claimant for the title of burn-queen -- she tries too hard. #TeamEmily

Definitely go at least to the end of this chapter, that's when it completely hooked me.

More please! Seeing how you guys react to it is already a blast.

I wanna watch more of this, but it hurts so much...

Easily one of my favorite games of the year. Keep going!

More of this, big fan of seeing Vinnys moral compass.

This game is beloved. If you don't like it cool. If you want to politely explain why it doesn't work in a light hearted way, great. Just keep in mind it is not just a few people here who love it, This is an extremely well received game with a lot of diehard fans; so you might as well punch at waves in the ocean...or go punch a whale, if you dare.

However, if you just want to slag-off the game and the people who like it just put down the keyboard, because you're are better than that. If you want to say what they should play instead there is a whole other thread for that too.

Hey guys if your reading this the dialogue does get better, they even mention it. Hope you guys continue on this game!

Keep playing! I want to see how your choices differ from my own.

Can't watch this even though I want to: I need to play Life is Strange first. :)

ALL-CAPS YES. RELEASE THE KRAKEN! :D

YUUUUSSSSS! G-BEAST!

I've been interested in this game for a while but never gotten around to playing it,

so I'm down with this content :)

I don't care what anybody says, Final fantasy: Spirits Within is hella one of the best scifi movies of all time.

oh my god i love this. I love GBEAST!!

It'd seem wrong to do Phantasmagoria 2 without Dave Snider. Also, Life Is Strange is a super good cool game that they need to see through to the finish!

This was great. Would really love a complete playthrough!

PLEASE keep going! Really enjoyed this episode.