A short discovery of certain years in my horrible childhood, a playthrough of Fantasy World Dizzy for the Commodore 64, with commentary by me and my horrible friend Gabriel. The company founded by the Oliver Twins is Blitz Games, not Blaze Games as I say in this video. OOPSY DAISY
The second part of the epic (50 minute) adventure. Both episodes were completed at the same time but I sat on this one for a couple of days in accordance with the principle of 'treat them mean, keep them keen'.
Gabriel takes me through an old Master System game he used to play. Apologies for the artefacting on the videos. Also apologies for Gabriel, generally.
The concluding portion of Gabriel's playthrough of Alex Kidd in High Tech World, in which we tackle the most wilfully obnoxious puzzle design in the history of adventure games and Gabe fucks up the video editing.
Your bestest pals (well, somewhat fond acquaintances at least) Yahtzee and Gabriel step into the individually categorised shoes of the world's worst murderer in Creative Reality's Dreamweb from 1992. (Watch this one in full screen. Seriously. It's one titchy-ass game)
Ryan finally gets around to actually murdering someone at the expense of any hope we had for a PG rating. View in large size for full appreciation of pixelly tits and bums. Maybe don't watch this one at work. Part 3 tomorrow!
Neil 'Ryan' Gaiman continues bumbling his way through improving his murder portfolio in inverse proportion to the quality of the game design. Stay tuned for the final tortuous episode tomorrow!
Ryan 'Neil Gaiman' Whateverhisnameis blunders his way to a conclusion that turns out as well for him as could be expected and Creative Reality struggles to think of people to credit. Thanks for watching.
Gabriel and I "enjoy" the second in the original and "best" independent adventure game "trilogy". There's a spoiler for Game of Thrones series/book 1 hidden in here somewhere so don't say you weren't warned. It's just one 45 minute video so make yourself a nice cup of milky tea or something.
Coming to you in one-big-massive-video-o-vision, Gabriel and I slog our way through the early days of one of the most notable game developers to come out of France. On the way we discuss the butt of the space monkey, how close is 'close enough' to stick a lance up a tree, and how inspiring it is to see a video game developer cast pivotal roles with the mentally abnormal.
Gabriel takes the helm to take us through a lesser-known Sierra adventure game from 1988 with a slightly homoerotic title.
Sierra as an adventure game developer made six Space Quests, seven Leisure Suit Larrys and enough King's Quests to choke a dog, so it seems odd that they only made two Manhunters. Perhaps the answer behind this perplexing riddle will unfold within this video.
Another retro adventure game pick, one of the first ones I owned for my Amiga 600 in my misspent youth. We present this video in memorial of Gabriel's head, which tragically broke about twenty minutes in. I was going to split this video into half-hour or twenty-minute episodes, but once it got a really good stream of consciousness going I couldn't pick out any good logical cut points. That, and also I couldn't be arsed.
To celebrate the holiday season, we slog through Gabriel's playthrough of Young Merlin for the SNES, a game greatly let down by its lack of association with Nicol Williamson in Excalibur. In this opening episode, Merlin forgets to rescue his drowning girlfriend to the utter contempt of her dad, while a prevalence of rainbow imagery leads to a frank and mature conversation about the alternative sexualities.
In the second of our three-part Christmas adventure into the Arthurian canon, Merlin continues his quest for any kind of motivation whatsoever, Gabriel tells us more about his personal life than anyone could be comfortable with, and I need another drink.
Merlin combs his way towards a happy ending while Gabriel continues telling us charming things about himself and the various liquids he emits. A merry Merlin Christmas to everyone else who has nothing better to do today.
Gabriel and I brave the minigame-fueled adventures of the world's most adequate secret agent in Operation Stealth (aka James Bond: The Stealth Affair in the US), Delphine Software's 1990 follow-up to Future Wars. I put it all up in one big video because that approach seems to hold greater appeal. Feel free to watch half now and half in a few days if you prefer an episodic experience.
It's been a while but we're back and in it for the long haul, because Gabriel showed up at my house with a 3 and a half hour video of Normality, a first-person adventure game from 1996. What took place on that fateful afternoon I have come to accept in part as our penance for having been teenagers in the 90's. Played around with stereo commentary on this one, so if you like you could watch this with headphones on and imagine that the two of us are sitting either side of you, breathing down your ears. Our open-quotes-the-size-of-hot-air-balloons "hero", Kent Knutson, joins an extermist group and begins a spiral of destruction and terrorism that in a sane society would end with him hiding in a cave in Pakistan for ten years before getting shot by Navy Seals. Because he thinks everyone should have stupid haircuts.
Meanwhile, Gabriel and I argue about Star Trek and occasionally remember to talk about the game.
Kent Knutson continues his grisly character arc, transitioning from mild mannered tosspot to fugitive murderer, somehow managing to still look poorly dressed even when entirely disguised as someone else. Meanwhile, Gabriel and I begin to show signs of stress as we pass over the hump period of the three-hour original video, tagging out for alternating piss breaks and becoming fixated on the word 'monster'.
Kent Knutson - or to give him the name by which he will be known by history, The Monster Kent Knutson - concludes his campaign to bring down the government and replace authority with an anarchic maelstrom where those who seek order and sensible clothing are hunted through the streets like dogs and all of human history is destroyed in a spiral of chaos and horror. Meanwhile, Gabriel says the word 'bum'. And I laugh.
In our very first experimental dabble with commenting while playing, Gabriel and I take a look at this year's Flashback, the 1993 classic Delphine Software step platformer remade and reimagined in glorious HD. 'HD' in this case stands for 'Huge Douche'.
We're getting back to our roots and, in many ways, embracing aspects of our own psyches by doing a playthrough of a classic adventure game about a pathetic man utterly humiliating himself in a quest to get his ugly little bone on. Maybe don't watch this one at work if your boss is on the lookout for vibrantly-coloured pixel poon.
Don't miss the retarded conclusion of this exciting game about a loser ceasing to be a loser and ironically losing any sense of identity he had. Better watch right to the end if you want some real genuine no fooling proper closure from all this wank.
Gabriel's latest attempt to try my patience is making me watch yet another three hour video, this one of various people with heads too small for their bodies pretending to be very serious police officers.
The epic career path of Sonny Bonds continues as he gets promoted to the Narcotics division and successfully rids the world of all the bad drugs for the kids.
Our story concludes with Sonny Bonds demonstrating his strange ideas about the criminal life. And Gabriel being the crapout that he is, the video switches to the long play of the game by NintendoComplete.
As something of a follow-up to my shitty indie adventures from the 90's, Gabriel takes us through someone else's indie RPG from around the same period, in which a young hero struggles to overcome the implication that he is poorly endowed.
We conclude the process of turning a small-penised youth into an equally small-penised hero, and I teach Gabriel about stream-of-consciousness talking, which he utterly fails to take on board, the big spoilsport bellend.
We decide to take a week off from Resident Evil 4 to do some more retro adventure gaming, and spend a leisurely hour searching for a purpose in life in the classic point-and-click wander-around-em-up.
Gabriel is as good as his word and starts us off on the dystopian adventures of Robert Foster, the wasteland dweller with astonishingly good personal grooming.
We finish the game in an extra special double length episode because why the fuck not, and take it in turns to remember the titles of all the James Bond films.
Gabriel and I pioneer the concept of Let's Drown Out, a hybrid of Let's Play and podcast in which a visually dull game is played and we resort to a list of podcast topics when we run out of things to say. In this inaugural video, I play Quake 2 and we discuss pranking, next-gen consoles, and societal problems. Come join the revolution.
In a probably futile attempt to keep the momentum going on this new idea, we did another one just one week after the first. This week, Gabriel plays a rather dodgily-emulated version of Blue Stinger for the Dreamcast while the conversation rambles disjointedly around the philosophies of Kickstarter, Youtube copyright claiming and dogs jumping out of butts.
In a twist on the format, we play an actually good game, but try to make it boring by playing it in a boring way. The game, unfortunately, fights this endeavour tooth and nail. Meanwhile, we discuss the problems with modern warfare shooters and what to sing on a family road trip.
We lost our first take of this so enjoy the angry energy that infuses Gabriel's second playthrough of the classic arcade brawler. On the way we discuss our new year resolutions and Gabriel offers his stupid opinions on my game of the year pick. Be warned that our conversation turns a bit racy at times, 'cos that's what tends to happen when Gabriel and I watch perfect masculine specimens rubbing their pectorals together.
Enjoy this lazy, chilled out session as we discuss Disney's machinations, new game concepts and the best medium for giant penis facsimiles, while actually doing something constructive for once, however many times Gabriel tries to talk me into firebombing my neighbour's turf. Yes, we're playing Minecraft. A game severely underserved by LP videos, I think Youtube only has about seven or eight million of them.
Gabriel plays a game he quite likes from his childhood which becomes boring to watch because of all the dying he does 'cos he's shit at it. Meanwhile, we discuss console sales reports and the export of Australian television.
It's temporarily back to our old ways as we showcase a retro adventure game with a post-commentary video, but eventually fall back into our new habits and talk about Xbox One Machinima flappery, the Candy Crush Saga copyright flappery, and how not to end an adventure game.
It's cheeky Gabriel's turn to play and he picked a game I have less interest in than the contents of a sweaty carpenter's jockstrap. We discuss Playstation Now news, the state of Nintendo, and Dark Souls, while Gabriel expresses all his secret man-fantasies and I improvise songs about lovely kisses.
This week I picked out Hexen, the infuriating guess-what-door-you-just-opened simulator, which swiftly reminds me and Gabriel of a similar but much better game that is currently our mutual favourite, and which we then refuse to stop banging on about. In between gushes, however, we also manage to discuss Dungeon Keeper Mobile and have a brief falling out over Flappy Bird.
Gabriel brings along a game that is neither Silent Hill nor Resident Evil, but which most definitely is a tie-in for a popular 90's television programme. While that's going nowhere fast, we discuss tie-in games generally and the upcoming wave of big quarter 1 releases. Also: our first ever Youtube copyright tussle. Yay!
To mend our increasingly bickery relationship, I engineer a simulated cohabitation for avatars of myself and Gabriel, who proceed to bitingly satirise our actual lives. Meanwhile, we talk about basically bugger all 'cos it's a slow news week.
What better way to pay tribute to the late Harold Ramis than to watch his super-deformed avatar get hit by every single hazard in Ghostbusters for the SEGA Genesis because Gabriel's shit at games? While he bumbles his way to victory with the infinite lives cheat on, we also discuss Peter Molyneux and gay representation among video game protagonists, ineptly. PS. Yes, we realised after the fact that there was a mouse cursor on screen the whole time. Learn to live with him. His name's Clive.
We till the motherfucking shit out of the soil in this earnest appreciation for tile-based farming games from an age before the genre went all social media on us. While winkling tortured innuendo from every possible hole we also cover Batman: Arkham Knight, hypothetical new game-to-film adaptations, and how ironic is too ironic.
Gabriel finally has the time to grace us with his presence, and embarks upon an abortive cycling tour of one of the in-betweener Grand Theft Autos. We also talk about a whole bunch of things I can't be bothered to itemise into a list. Get that maple syrup warming, viewers, 'cos we're gonna get our waffle on.
Gabriel and I discover at length that we don't have any particularly strong opinion on the Facebook - Oculus VR thing, and then start talking about the Count of Monte Cristo for some reason, while playing the first Silent Hill under a special custom condition that I have named Stupid American Developer. Sorry, did I say 'developer'? I meant Stupid American Tourist.
Dissuaded from doing Phantasmagoria 1, Gabriel instead does the sequel, a game neither of us know jack shit about. Which explains why I keep saying Roberta Williams wrote it, when in fact Lorelei Shannon did. Whoops. That is by far the worst thing that happens in this video. Except the sound quality. And the acting. And everything we talk about.
I play the classic platformer on Richter mode - no story, no items, no worries - while Gabriel and I discuss such topics as the Heartbleed Bug, technology, and why can't celebrities stop dying all over the place. We most definitely do not talk about social justice this time.
Gabriel plays a game which, like many, he is shit at. But in this case it may be more to do with his reduced number of platelets, or perhaps the game assaulting him with helpful gameplay hints the whole way through. Meanwhile, with fuck all much going on to talk about, we discuss some films we watched and how Steve Irwin fulfilled his marital obligations.
Gabriel and I discover why it's called Euro Truck Simulator as opposed to Euro Truck STIMulator. On a delightful road trip through France we find there's not much worth talking about but somehow manage to meander through various topics anyway, most of which I've forgotten. I do remember that we've got some pretty reductive ideas of what truck drivers are like.
We have a crack at the 'masterpiece edition' of the 'classic' adventure 'game' and go somewhere between nowhere slow and nowhere fast. We also talk about the leaked Advanced Warfare trailer and some films we watched. Coo.
Prepare to faff about like you've never faffed before as we continue playing an Assassin's Creed game long after all possible fun has been extracted from it. While we're doing that we also accidentally trap ourselves into talking about Nintendo's homophobia scandal, some films we watched and the upcoming Constantine series. Watch out for an incredible twist ending!
What better game exists to commemorate the late H. R. Giger than the seminal classic Alien 3 for the SNES? Besides Dark Seed, but Retsupurae already did that one. We also discuss the Bombshell trailer and the Kinectless Xbone, and I think there's a mention of shitting on a glass coffee table buried in here somewhere.
To mark my birthday, we enjoy some proper "maturity" in-the-largest-quotation-marks-available-to-man with the Brutal Doom mod for Doom 2. We discuss the publicity of Watch Dogs, the lack of same for Half-Life 3, and draw just a bit too much amusement from the 'swear at people' button.
For no particular reason, Gabriel opts to play the very first GTA game, in all its camera-lurchy seasick glory. We also discuss the looming spectre of E3, the Ricky Gervais Show, that new X-men film they put out, and the usual complement of knob references.
Gabriel and I finally take some god damn responsibility and clean up that mess we made in Brutal Doom. During the process we idly pass the time discussing the three elephants in the room that is E3.
I made the foolish mistake of inviting Gabriel to play one of those fighting games he likes so much, and he responds by playing three of the buggers. Three of those many godawful fighting games with digitized live actors that came out after Mortal Kombat did alright. We also ramble vaguely around the topics of Phil Fish, the vagaries of internet fame, and isn't it a shame about Rik Mayall.
I entreat Gabriel to join me for a nice traditional Commodore 64 experience with the lesser-known LucasArts factory sim, but for some reason he can't seem to summon much enthusiasm. Then we talk about the Sims 4, the Nintendo/Philips lawsuit, and how much of a nob Gabriel is. Also the correct spelling of 'nob'.
Gabriel embraces his shit-at-gamesness to spend an entire virtual college fund on the classic arcade coin thief while the conversation tangents like a fucking triangle factory through the topics of sexism in professional gaming, recreational drugs, and the misuse of the Bioshock Infinite logo. Also, we revisit the situation from back in the Final Fight video where I get terribly frustrated at Gabriel for seriously overthinking the concept of 'game of the year', but don't worry, we're still pals.
After last week I felt it was time we calmed down with a nice relaxing arty game unhampered by anything as stressful as an actual 'game' aspect, and during a lovely walk in the woods we discuss new Smash Bros characters and EA being horrible again. We also clarify a couple of positions regarding last week's disagreement and American gun ownership. In the hope that you don't all come over on a boat and shoot us. And as mentioned in the video, feel free to post questions in the comments section that we can use to drive the chat in next week's video. As long as it's not 'where do you get your ideas'.
Gabriel plays one of his old Master System games and proceeds to utterly fail to sell me or anyone else on the sodding thing. The Ramble Express then visits the following stations: Doom (4), comic book headline grabbing, and pro gaming. We also debut the answering of questions that were put to us last week, as threatened. If you've got questions for next week, stick 'em in the comments below or direct them to Gabriel's twitter: @gabrielenguard
Gabriel and I discover a NEW DIMENSION IN HORROR. It's a pretty crap dimension, probably explains why nobody bothered discovering it. Also, in a bold format experiment, we ditch the whole news topics thing completely and solely answer audience questions. Coo!
We play the one game that, for some reason, Id Software opted to omit from the Complete Commander Keen Pack on Steam. I WONDER WHY. We also answer questions on sex, sci fi, and hard liquors. Why not take a shot of one every time Gabriel dies and blames something other than himself?
For reasons best known to myself I challenge myself to find a game based on the randomly-chosen word 'truth', settling on Monolith's rather lovely detective / class warfare simulator. We also manage to talk about a gaming topic related to Paul McCartney for three tenths of a nanosecond. (It's only in 360p because for some reason Youtube was throwing a shit fit about processing the 720p version, but it's not like the visuals are the important part)
Guided by last week's keyword, "Woman", Gabriel chooses the slightly suspect arty game by Tale of Tales. And I like to think we navigate this particular conversational can of worms adeptly, managing to only mention sexual assault fifty or sixty times.
We escape last week's can of worms only to find that during the week the world of gaming news opened up a nice big fresh one for us. Fortunately we manage to avoid the trap by declaring that we won't talk about it, and then proceed to talk about it for half a fucking hour. Oh yeah, and we play Thief 2 somewhere in the back of it all and Gabriel channels James Lipton. Whoops! We forgot to pick a keyword to drive Gabriel's choice for next week. No worries, we did it off-camera, and randomly drew the word 'testily'. So you have that to look forward to.
Gabriel finally finds a healthy outlet for the anger he feels when I discipline him for poor mic etiquette, while we talk about Nintendo, Saints Row 4, the impressions we can do and absolutely NOTHING else.
The seed word 'indistinct' leads us to the unrelentingly grim indie silhouette-fest, one of the major players in the subgenre of indie games involving small characters with big heads exploring scary worlds (this subgenre consists of every indie game ever). We try to keep our spirits up with discussions relating to commenting on things and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Gabriel rather predictably uses his special word 'hiiissss' to tell us a familiar story about naked snakes, forgetting that he hasn't stopped being shit at games yet. Fortunately we find an elegant solution for his shortcomings around the halfway mark, and have some vague discussion about politics and wealth.
WHOOPS we forgot to pick Gabe's next word again. No worries, we picked it off-screen, but you'll have to read to the end of this description to find out what it was. This week in Drown Out, we play some submarine thing and talk about horror games. The word was 'Slide'.
Gabriel gets into the habit of pre-recording his videos so that he will stop getting distracted by the game all the time, but sadly this measure does little to stop him talking bollocks the whole way through this incredibly misguided fighting game adapted from a film that was only tangentially about fighting. Bollocks specifically about 4chan, Playstation Home, Steam curators and I think there's a little bit about titties near the end.
I express the word 'western' in the most appropriate way possible with a game set in the Old West in which you do nothing but move west. So sit back and enjoy the trailblazing adventures of Farmer Yahrtzee and four versions of Gabriel from parallel universes as we attempt to overcome humanity's greatest enemy: bushes you can't shoot through..
Gabriel plays a weird Japanese game about putting your lips on things that may or may not be porn, we never quite figure that out. While trying to ignore the weird vibration effect the emulator created, we talk about Hatsune Miku and other shit and YES I KNOW we forgot to pick the next word on air again. So we picked one afterwards, and the word was 'answer'. Coo!
We're back from a one-week break to very didactically play two games that involve phones in some central way, and we also get very didactic about the trailers for Hatred and I Am Bread. What a right pair of didacts we are.
Gabriel had the word 'father', and so he chose a game that has 'father' in the title, what a cunning little spod. We then spend most of our time with it ignoring it completely while we debate which Game of Thrones character the protagonist most resembles.
We explore the word 'weed' to create a video that, ironically, you probably shouldn't watch while operating heavy machinery. We also talk about Star Wars, GTA5 and Pinhead's willy and somehow manage to keep it good and boring throughout.
For our very first co-op Drown Out, a slightly unwell Gabriel picks a game about Michael Jackson, and conversation turns towards sexual deviance about as quickly as you'd expect. He also drastically underestimates how long it takes to play through, but we manage to mask the repetition with conversation about Ubisoft's woes and Swedish rating systems.
I take a rather obvious route for the word 'arising' as we rattle unconcernedly through such topics as Shirtstorm, Steam Early Access, 2.5D shooters, disappearing beards and what exactly differentiates 'retro' from 'retro-style'.
OH BOLLOCKS we forgot to pick a word. It's alright, we did it off air: next week's word of the week is 'Tired'. Anyway, Gabriel prerecords us a video of that most improbable of shooter releases, recording the footage in teeny-tiny shitty-resolution-vision so blame him for that. Let's see if we can beat last week's misogyny record.
I play a very tired game about being asleep just to cover the bases, and because I wanted something that wouldn't distract too much from us getting all in a big froth about Target Australia refusing to stock GTAV, a discussion that goes to all the places you probably expect it to go.
It's back! With a small format change that means we don't have to work or think as much: now we just talk whatever bollocks we want over whatever game we feel like. In this case, Gabriel takes his first command in FTL: Faster Than Light. Who will survive and what will be left of them? (Fraps seems to have slightly buggered the in-game audio but I'm lost as to why)
It's recently been released on Steam, although I reviewed it ages ago when all the smart people played it; it's the remake of the classic space explorer. What better time to talk about Star Trek at length.
We play a relatively recent indie game as part of a half-hearted quest for relevance. Gabriel talks about Mortal Kombat a lot.
We use a new tarmac-based art program to draw a big willy and some titties, at which point small people start living on them for some reason. It's Cities: Skylines, the sim so nice they named it twice.
We take on the roles of petty authoritarians with a frighteningly tight grasp on a frighteningly small amount of power in the utterly unique paperwork-em-up by Lucas Pope. Also, Gabriel is a dog now. Woof.
We discuss a few of the developments from E3 as we fart around for an hour in Plant Groping Simulator 2015. Don't miss the amazing stegosaurus song and dance routine at the very end.
We go into a game we don't know much about because some people seem to like it. Those people will probably find the next hour rather difficult.
We kill an hour and a bit indulging all our childhood footballing fantasies that didn't involve bending Posh Spice over a clothes horse.
We do something a bit different with the low-tech bomb defusal party game that demands strong co-operation and the ability to quickly and articulately exchange knowledge. Oh blimey this won't end well.
Something a little bit different this week as we go from low-tech co-op to somehow even lower tech, to the point of not playing a video game at all, instead competing at reading aloud a sterling work of classic literature.
We had some questions left over from last time so we answered them while playing some nice wholesome entertainment about bleeding foetuses.
After I discover that Fraps also works on Firefox, we play an addictive browser game and metaphor for life in general while talking about The Game Awards 2015.
We finally do something retro-style again for want of something vaguely Christmassy to mark the season with. Yeah, I ended that sentence with a preposition, what're you gonna do about it?
We embrace the co-op mindset and attempt to get through some classic shooter action without humiliating ourselves. Dressed like Father Christmas.
We try out a new indie game based largely around maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and as perhaps could have been predicted, proceed to not do terribly well.
Happy new year! Here's something we recorded yonks ago and never got around to using.
Hot on the heels of XCOM fucking up on us, Resident Evil decided it was going to join the party. So we ditched it in favour of a movie tie-in game for the SNES that Gabriel seems to like.
In a new feature for this channel, Gabriel plays through games I made ages ago that I remember very little about except that I feel vaguely ashamed about them. Starting with some games I made with AGS around 15 years ago, and I really do wonder why no-one in all that time ever pointed out how incredibly homoerotic these things got.
I'm just... I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything. Including this video.
We hark back to the days of Duke Nukem 3D modding to look at an old unfinished mod thing from back before I had a decent mic. I was going to split the video into two before I remembered that I couldn't be arsed. Also: the return of Q&A!
Our voyage through my embarrassing earlier works continues with a game from 2002 rather heavily inspired by the Monkey Island series if Monkey Island had been mainly about sex jokes. Donkey Island, perhaps. Also, at the end of the video the audio for the last word gets cut off, so here's a transcript. "rs". Enjoy.
We finally get to the interesting stuff and start on the Chzo Mythos, entering a nightmarish world of fixed perspective, uniform room sizes and weirdly hilarious vertical movement.
In the concluding episode, we find the dark answers to the game's many mysterious questions, such as "Is Yahtzee capable of creating an entire game without it getting stupid before the end?"
The Chzo Mythos continues when the horror that struck DeFoe Manor recurs inexplicably 400 years later, and it would have been very horrific indeed if any of the characters involved acted the slightest bit like human beings.
Events continue to escalate aboard the good ship Mephistopheles, culminating in some incredibly frustrating chase gameplay and a really really good plot twist at the end.
We start to rub up on the post-adventure game phase of my game dev history with an epic sci-fi tale of data validation specialists exploring the universe, doing a small amount of adventuring and an awful lot of baconburger selling.
Things start getting a bit weird as the crew of the Elaborate Gesture piece together the Extranoids' sinister plot, and we learn just how dangerous it can be to stay inside doing your maths homework.
A bandaged man wakes up in a cell in a facility with no memory of who he is or how he got there, and spends his days being routinely tortured by an insane scientist. Then things get worse.
The Chzo Mythos continues as we catch up with our old pal Trilby, former cat burglar turned obnoxiously verbose government agent.
The thief turned paranormal detective continues his journey into darkness, hoping to discover the secret behind the mysterious Tall Man so that they can share fashion tips.
The final chapter of the Chzo Mythos begins with some dense recapping and a council building inspector of the future being pushed down an elevator shaft.
The final, incredibly easy to understand chapter of the Chzo Mythos brings with it pain, horror and the occasional interesting bug.
Get it from here: http://www.theconsumingshadow.com Special offer! Buy from Humble Store before August 7th 2015 and you can buy it bundled with my two ebooks (Mogworld and Jam) for no extra cost! ($9.99) And if you have a moment, why not spend it voting us up on Steam Greenlight?
After watching Trilby get kicked up and down the garden path by occult forces for four games, we get to see the lighter adventures of his earlier life, when he was just being hunted and tortured by a ruthless all-powerful secret government. But at least no-one has to get nailed to anything.
The Ego Review is getting close to being finished, as we play my first Game Maker title and my last freeware release. Derek Badger, an unflappable Yorkshireman, descends into a Metroidvania underworld to rescue his local gamekeeper and save the world from creatures of darkness.
Derek Badger and Rebecca fight their way to the truth behind the war with the Dark Ones, and must face the ultimate test. Also, we get bored and Gabriel quizzes me on video game trivia.
We take a break from Dark Souls 2 to look at some old abandoned shit I made in Adventure Game Studio before moving on from it as a game development tool. So don't get too intrigued because these will never be finished. Also, don't expect a mid-week video this Wednesday. Basically just learn to generally lower your standards.
The Consuming Shadow Insanity Edition is now available on Steam! Get it here: http://store.steampowered.com//app/40... In this video, we demonstrate a few of the new features, such as the Daily Challenge mode, in the only way we know how: with competitive bickering.
Gabriel and I make good on our threat to play a whole game, picking one close to our hearts that I know quite well but he doesn't: Dark Souls 2, switching player duties with every death. In the premier episode, Gabriel takes revenge for my choice of our character's surname by making him look like a bellend.
Douglas Uppity crowns himself the king of the Forest of Fallen Giants while blatantly missing as many things as he can get away with, but can he prevail against the mighty Dennis?
Douglas Uppity makes his way through Heide's Tower of Flame, while I continue my concerted efforts to get Gabriel killed as often and as spectacularly as possible. Although he doesn't need much help with that in this one.
Douglas Uppity explores No Man's Wharf as he reminisces about the events that left him a fugitive from justice. Meanwhile, we tackle the questions from the /letsdrownout subreddit and try not to fall out over Gabriel's three second attention span.
As Douglas battles the Flexile Sentry and discovers the not-lost-anymore Bastille, Gabriel and I manage to move past our earlier squabbling by focussing on the things that bring us together, such as massive amounts of barely-repressed homoeroticism.
We (eventually) give the Pursuer what for and then take it to his extended family in the Lost Bastille. Meanwhile, Douglas Uppity's backstory goes increasingly off the rails.
We tie up the Lost Bastille, have a run-in with the Lost Sinner - blimey, there are a lot of lost things around here - and realise we don't really have a clear idea on which way we're going to go next.
We're back! Just in time to break the seal of freshness on Huntsman's Copse, as we struggle with remembering how to play the game, me being jet lagged, and Gabriel being Gabriel.
Fair warning: we spend this entire episode failing to defeat the Executioner's Chariot. In our defense, though, I was still jetlagged and Gabriel was still Gabriel. We focus rather more on answering questions in the meantime, so do remember to submit more questions to the /letsdrownout subreddit.
We very swiftly deal with that bloody chariot and then, while we're on a roll, give the Skeleton Lords a damn good seeing to as well. Man, this place has so many skeletons I'd call it the Bone Zone if I hadn't already called my bedroom that.
Douglas makes his way through Harvest Valley and Earthen Peak, while Gabriel and I start giving the subtle impression that one or both of us are getting a trifle bored with this whole backstory concept.
Douglas Uppity polishes off the Earthen Peak and gets started on Bowser's castle, as we hear the final instalment of his tortured backstory and move onto a hopefully less played out gimmick.
We bang our heads against the Smelter Demon a few times and overall make a good solid room's worth of forward progress.
We eventually wrap up the Iron Keep by smashing up the Old Iron King's delicate little handsies, and Gabriel tells a very funny joke about Kurt Vonnegut.
Flush with success from murdering the Old Iron King, we try out a new wardrobe and actually make some half decent progress without fucking up too much. Relatively speaking.
We make a quite surprisingly large amount of progress, although rest assured I'm sure we'll screech promptly to a halt once we get into Brightstone Cove.
Okay, so apparently I was wrong when I said Brightstone Cove Tseldora would be a sticking point. In fact, once we wrap that up we spend the rest of the episode searching in vain for something that can put up a decent challenge to my unstoppable roll.
Sod it, let's just go to Drangleic Castle. I hear they have a nice gift shop.
We blow the popsicle stand that is Drangleic Castle and begin our ill-fated descent through the Shrine of Arse-mana. We tried to record another thing for midweek but it turned into a massive trainwreck so this is all you're getting.
The arsey part of the game continues to arse up a storm. Hey, did I forget to mention that the Steam holiday sale is on and Consuming Shadow is 50% off? Well it is.
We've got a lot of sneaky assholes and big fat ogres to kill, but Douglas continues to put his best face forward.
We conquer Aldia's Keep and Dragon Aerie largely by ignoring most of it. Fair warning, we have one of our trademark tiffs from around the 22nd to the 26th minute, so be warned if you're one of those people who find them upsetting 'cos you don't understand how a rollicking manly friendship works. If it helps, think of it like we're in a relationship, except we use arguing in place of sex.
With our pledge to steadfastly ignore the DLC and within spittin' distance of the end of the game, can a ragtag handful of boss fights stop Douglas Uppity from wrapping this shit up in one episode?
So after finally freeing ourselves of Dark Souls 2, we resolve to follow it up with a sumptuous pudding of a game that's considerably shorter and that hopefully I know more about.
Gordon makes it to the surface and almost immediately regrets it, so he goes back underground to kill a couple of giant monsters. Meanwhile, we encounter a few more bugs to add to Half-Life: Source's catalogue.
Gordon gets off those sodding railway tracks and finds that the soldiers on the surface have laid on a surprise party.
The military bring out their big hardware and Gordon is repeatedly driven to suicide by helicopters that just don't have the basic common decency to explode properly.
Gordon makes it to Xen and brings an end to the alien threat, except going by Half-Life 2, not really. This is an extra long episode to finish things up. I was gonna split it up but the final boss fight turned into rather an adventure in failure.
After fucking everything up at Black Mesa and letting aliens invade, Gabriel and I get some false passports and endeavour to redeem ourselves by signing up with X-COM. Not sure how much of the game we'll get through but almost certainly more if it continues to go as swimmingly as it did here.
The struggle against the alien threat continues as our heroes, both cast as Support losers, are now forced to take it in turns to hold the other soldiers' coats. On the bright side, we found the Officer Training School.
New monsters are introduced and a couple of hairy moments cause me to lose faith in my own abilities. Also, someone dies and nobody cares.
One buggered up save file puts a rather abrupt end to the series, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a glimpse of what might have been by playing a bit of my old save file that's near the end of the game when nothing short of a tactical nuclear strike can so much as dent me feckin' shinguards.
It's Gabriel's turn to play all of a game he knows, and he goes for the remake of the "classic" "survival" "horror" game. In this first episode, a big-titted geologist embarrasses herself for an hour.
We continue bumming around the house, and momentarily get caught up on a stupid suits of armour puzzle. Also, I think I make a menstruation joke at one point.
I pay as little attention to the game as possible as Gabriel continues to do a load of puzzle bullshit and we hammer through more questions than usual, covering such diverse topics as Dark Souls 3 and Rik Mayall's bottom.
Plenty of thrills and spills this week: fiery dragons, suits of armour, descending ceilings, the bit where you control Ashley and Luis getting a big pulsating one right up his arse.
I take the helm for the last bit of the castle section of the game to plot us a course that's sure and steady, if slightly marred by chainsaw decapitations.
Gabriel gets us started on the island area and proceeds to get blown up a lot. Also, some information on my eventual buggering off and consequent end of Drown Out.
Circumstances left us with only more chance to record, so we did a great big long session of Portal 2 co-op and split it into two videos just to draw out your separation anxiety.
We continue playing Portal 2 until our brains get tired, then round things off with the mammoth Q&A session you didn't know you wanted.
The slightly late stream of Vampyr, with special guest.
Jurassic World: Evolution, a game about doing a great big fart in Jeff Goldblum's stupid doomsaying face.