Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

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Just a note, I did go back to one of them yesterday, mostly because I had missed a few areas. It was the meatiest one from what I had played, mind you, so it was an area that I reasonably assumed they just hadn't finished yet, only for it to turn out that there was an entire pool part going on behind the Villa with absolutely no indication that it was there, or that you could go there. Not even an invitation! The nerve! >:[

Actually, that gets into the special kind of bad I was referring to. This game was a mess, with tons of clashing gameplay elements and odd design decisions, no real story to speak of, characters have no reason to be where they are, while also showing up in completely random places, several locations that you can get into that you're not supposed to, like rooms that say they're locked, but aren't actually locked and have stuff in them. Not to mention my personal favorite: one time I glitched into a warehouse that actually had stacks of boxes, equipment, and a garage that is clearly meant to service a 3D model of a truck that would've looked pretty sweet back in 1999. What was the point if no one's supposed to go here? Is it a work-in-progress but not labeled as such? Easter egg? I don't know, and I don't care anymore.

Don't even get me started on the 4 hours I spent on the obtuse puzzles that involved a completely-out-of-place Star Gate that involves very sloppy copies of puzzles ripped straight out of Myst, including one where you click on stars, except there were no hints, no constellations involved, nothing! No setup whatsoever! I wouldn't have even known it was a thing if I didn't look it up! Mind you, it only took me so long because I was missing a piece - I had to go to a different Star Gate to get the last marble before I could finally travel to an abandoned space station on Europa in the future that just...raises too many questions...

Who built this station? What did it do? It was apparently being refurbished by the owner of the beach resort I was in, which in retrospect the resort only seemed to service employees of said company. How did he know how to fix this station? Is he an alien? Is he from the future? This informatin completely changes the context for everything that preceded it! I just thought this was just a random resort run by some Girls Gone Wild knock-offs who were exploiting the natives of a small island nation so they can have a 24-hour non-stop porn shoot! But could this really mean the area was being occupied by an advanced alien race of which the player is supposed to be a part of, with the intent of colonizing it, or at least exploiting it for their own gain? And what of the women, who never seem to have anything to say except, "let's bang!" - are they just genetically alterted sex slaves, perhaps derived from the very natives themselves?!

Of course not. The entire station was just a vault that contained a portal to the original version of this game from back in 2004. That's the real mind-bending twist here: that the same few people have been working on one game in one form or another for waaaay too long!

And I wasn't even playing the most recent iteration, either. They stopped working on the flash version back in 2017, and started rebuilding it in Unity. That version actually has more backround info and certainly more context for why everyone is here. It's still nothing to right home about, and it's too early in to say if it'll be a cohesive experience, but um....I'm just baffled as to how long this game has been around. I guess, in retrospect, I think I might've even played a version before back when Newgrounds was still relevant. It did seem to have some influence in the (barely existant) furry game community, but I'm not sure how much. Mostly I just noticed a few comments regarding other games I had played that were compared to it, though mostly in a "Yeah, I remember when these used to be cool. They're kind of embarassing now, though" kind of way.

I even replayed a few that I remember binging back in 2016 that scared the **** of me for reasons I forgot. I figured maybe having proper context as to what informed their design would help make them less traumatizing, especially since in retrospect, they were probably referencing eachother both directly and indirectly, and that might explain why they seemed so off-putting.

Nope. Nope, that was a mistake. They were just really creepy games designed by people who were insane. One had a haunted house-esque premise for no reason. In another, I played a few versions, since at some point its developer had the brilliant idea to discard half a decade of work so he could change it from a group of space truckers chasing tail while their ship refeuls, to a game that makes the player feel like they're in space prison, and everyone wants your bird boy butt. At least that same developer eventually came up with an even more brilliant idea not long after, of persuing a different career entirely...which they excelled in. Good for them.

And lastly a game that has the gall to call itself a remaster despite being functionally and artistically inferior to its predecessor, and the only new content were some out-of-place jump scares.

...Sometimes, it's better to just let things stay buried.