Noah's frustrated speculation about why F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin had Creepy Child Alma having such a dramatic motivation shift - he imagines an executive asking three people what made her scary. One says "She's relentless!", one says "She's unpredictable!", the third says "Uuuhhh... ghost pussy?" and it's the third that the executive takes to enthusiastically.
Noah's description of Crysis 2's plot:
Noah: Of course, Crysis 2 does have something that makes it unique:One of the most genuinely incomprehensible video game stories I've ever seen. I don't play many JRPGs, admittedly, but Crysis 2 and 3 are notoriously difficult to follow. So, here's how we start off: You're a marine, just a regular marine, named Alcatraz. You're in a submarine en route to New York. There's an explosion! Aliens have attacked! Somehow! From Somewhere! (frantically) You escape the sub but are broken by the explosion! (calmly) Prophet, from the first game, heroically strides into view, scoops you up, and says: (In his best 'Action Movie Star" voice) Destiny's a bitch, huh? It'll be on you now, son!
Noah commenting on Far Cry 3's Citra kills Jason ending, feeling it is both a bit of a Broken Aesop and somewhat heavy-handed:
Noah: It's a joke, ultimately, but a single joke is a poor thing to aim 30 hours of game activity towards, and a poorer one where the joke is still at someone's expense. Far Cry 3 wants to be multilayered and subversive, but all it ends really feeling like in the end is a Tales from the Crypt where it fades back into a comic book panel and the Crypt Keeper turns around to say: (in Crypt Keeper voice) I guess Jason should have learned he should get to know a girl before he takes the plunge! HE HE HA HA HA!!(laughter turns into coughing)
During his Max Payne retrospective, he explains his love for the first game's mooks for them being "the fucking nerdiest mooks you will ever find in a videogame" with him later describing their personality as "(In a faux-Brooklyn accent) Ah! Gee! Ouch! You shot me, Kappa!".
This anecdote from his re-review of No-Mans-Sky:
Noah: One of the chromatic worlds I found was purple, and the gigantic ring plants that had looked so sinister on other chromatic worlds suddenly seemed majestic. Fairy lizards with tusks and bee wings buzzed beside a pond in a thick wood, surrounded by lavender grass. It was a surrealist Eden. I decided to hunt the fairy lizards. I had a quest to murder me some animals, but that’s not why I did it. I simply wanted to be an asshole in Paradise for a moment. It was such a beautiful place, the animals were so goofy, and here I was running around yelling “Come here ya sonuvabitch!”
In the Ghost Recon™: Wildlands video, when talking about the Cartel Road DLC, he goes in detail how the DLC nearly broke him due to a combination of bad driving physics, insensible Latino stereotypes, grindy progression and obnoxious characters but what makes him lose some faith in humanity is the fact that at least 1.42 percent of PlayStation 4 players beat it - a number, he believes, that's too high.
From the same review, Noah reveals that his wife has a bad habit of unintentionally walking in at the worst possible times while he's playing a game - in this case, right after Jackie dies during the end of Act 1's heist, and poor Noah is bawling his eyes out over how "Well it's 'cuz all of- all Jackie ever wanted was to be somebody man! But Jackie DIED! He DIED right there in the back of the cab where we swore we was gonna make it together!". Cue Noah's wife giving him an understanding nod, and sloooowly backing out of the room.
In Noah's Death Stranding analysis, he talks about Heartman's strongly heart-related theme, including a nearby lake shaped like a heart...and admits that until he was told this, he took rather a different stance on which body part it resembled.
Noah: Even the lake outside his laboratory is intended to look like a heart...but, when it was a blank space on the over map, I spent several hours mentally referring to it as "Mount Ballsack" before actually being told what it was supposed to look like.
Earlier in that same review Noah talks about the plot having absurd and pretentious elements particularly when paired with Kojima's reputation for being one of the MOST FAMOUS DEVELOPINGUNITS!! in the world.
During his Resident Evil retrospective he reaches the two DLC campaigns for Resident Evil: Revelations 2 and immediately declares neither of them being worth the time to play. He then explains he has two reasons for including them anyway; the first is reasonable enough, he can explain them in ten minutes and thus save his audience a couple hours. The second reason is...well:
From that same review, the absolute venom with which Noah says Steve whenever discussing the character in Resident Evil – Code: Veronica is sure to elicit some chuckles.
The same can also be said about his incredulous reaction to "Andy the Janitor" from Resident Evil: Gun Survivor. Which gets a callback several hours later, a Brick Joke made all the better by the review's nearly seven and a half hour runtime.
What he has to say about the AI NPCs in Resident Evil: Outbreak that take over if you aren't playing online (which is impossible because the servers were shut down) is very pointed:
In practice, you have a bunch of useless weirdos zooming all over the place, moving all the shit, chattering nonsense to themselves and everyone around them, with no intention or ability to contribute to the objectives, which you must shoulder all the actual work for. So I guess... Not that different from playing online after all.
Noah's Dark Souls retrospective reveals that, when the chips are down, he is an absolutely shameless Combat Pragmatist, using everything in his disposal to beat whoever gets in his way. Most of the time it's just him calling for help or using magic at a distance, but a few notable examples include:
Kicking his poise into overdrive to face tank all of Artorias' fancy sword moves.
Beating Sister Friede's third phase with the Boulder Heave spell, or as he puts it, "magical nausea", to stun her while the NPC Summon goes to town.
And finally, beating Slave Knight Gael, with Pestilent Mist...or as Noah so eloquently surmises:
I would now destroy the most fearsome foe in the trilogy, with my toxic farts.
It also makes for a more subtle and much darker joke when you realize that not only does it apply to the series, it can also apply to his making a second Soulsborne video, as his first effort resulted in months of harassment from Dark Souls fans due to his views on the the (in)famous difficulty level of Fromsoft's games, and how it's discussed in the community.
Talking about the endings to Bloodborne, Noah lays out the horror of replacing Gehrman like so:
Doomed to an eternity of delivering cryptic, darkly ironic dialogue to impatient player characters mashing the 'Skip' button. Chilling stuff indeed.
Lady Butterfly (upon defeating the player character, Wolf):Still only a puppy.
Noah, after three hours of attempts: Yes! This is exactly correct! I am a puppy. I'm a puppy now, pat me on the fucking head and give me a goddamned treat. Cut me a goddamned break Lady Butterfly, call me a puppy all day long, just let me move on. Woof woof woof.
He then goes on to describe the hypothetical easier mode as "Puppy Mode" for the rest of the Sekiro segment.
Noah compares Hoarah Loux's second phase cutscene to something out of a Professional Wrestling match. Complete with convincingly hammy and energetic commentary.
What a moment! What incredible energy in the Erdtree Arena as Godfrey the Golden murders his own ghost cat in a fit of rage! The crowd is loving it!
That's right, Tom, we haven't seen an appearance by Hoarah Loux since he won Thunder From Down Under in 1986! I'll tell ya, anything can happen tonight at the foot of the Erdtree and probably will, after this brief message from our friends at Leyndell Chevrolet!
While reflecting that Fallout 2's endgame isn't as thematically complex as the early and midgame, Noah describes the Hubologists.
Without that aspect of going to the stars, the Hubologists are just a cartoonish and exceptionally broad caricature of Scientology. Which is a fine and good thing to make fun of in general, because Scientology is stupid and hurts people.
Noah detestsFallout: Brotherhood of Steel, finding it "aggressively" boring and full of strange choices, but mainly, he's frustrated with what it chose to focus and spend what would have taken significant time and money on, such as the quest where the player is tasked with finding a lost cat called "Mr Pussy". In a game with only a handful of quests, this represents a substantial amount of the effort put into development.
Creatively a development team must pick and choose which ideas and characters are worth making the cut. They need to figure out how to tell the best story and create the most vibrant world with the most limited amount of resources and somehow, in spite of this, "Mr Pussy" made the cut. The Mr Pussy quest was passed through several stages of design! Someone had to write the Mr Pussy dialogue, a voice actress had to record the Mr Pussy lines, Ruby's 3D model had to be rigged and animated to convey the Mr Pussy quest to the player. Bad dialogue and bad ideas in a movie are actually more understandable because there are so many fewer steps and so much less expense to realizing a bad idea in a movie than in game development. Bad dialogue in books is most understandable of all, since all it takes is one person sitting alone having a brain fart. In games these things have so many layers of production to trickle down through before being fully realized! At some point, around some large office table, someone said something close to "I'm happy with how damage animations are coming but I haven't gotten any updates on Mr Pussy at all in a few days and I'm wondering where we're at with implementation!"
On the improbability of playing Quake for the story:
But there is no justice, and there is no Santa Claus, so I critique as I please. I'm going to tackle the Quake series from a narrative perspective, and there's nothing you fuckers can do to stop me.
Travelogues
The cow herd from "Atomic Pilgrimage."
Noah: In the morning, I got up with the dawn and hit the Nevada border early; early enough that my first taste of this mysterious and underpopulated part of the country was to encounter a herd of cattle completely blocking the pass from the lower desert valley to the upper desert valley towards Gerlach. I drove up to the cowboy, asked him how he wanted me to handle it, and he said "Oh, they're real gentle. Just drive on through, and they'll move for ya." And Goddamned if they didn't! I shifted into a tentative first gear, and they parted like a smelly, furry river around a boulder. We were quite the mashup, the traveler with his herd, the bearded traveler with his Volkswagen, both of us around 30, both of us looking like some echo from the past, [and] I think we were equally entertained by the situation, too; I caught him cracking up in the rear view to see the high prow of the bus moving through the moving, farting herd. For the most part, they seemed willing to let me get on past, but one cow stopped right in front of me to take a massive and defiant piss right on the pavement.I gave him his moment; it's not often a cow gets to pull a power move on a guy like that. I honestly could hardly believe the scene as it was unfolding; ranching is one of the most iconic professions in America, but it's infrequently that city people like me actually encounter it so directly as this. Most people's world is one of stoplights and strip malls, mine included. This guy's world is so quiet that he can drive a herd of cattle through the byway and still be surprised to see someone rolling up on him.
This is aided by the footage of the herd, which does indeed show cattle courteously avoiding Noah's van, and the one cow who peed in his path.
During his stay at Point Pleasant as recorded in "The Real Life Landscapes of Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76", Noah visits the local attractions about The Mothman, including a steel statue depicting it. What follows is one of the most hilarious observations about the cryptid ever:
Noah: Next to the museum is the Mothman statue, which I love with all my heart, because not only did they go hard on the design, the artists spent what seems like a great deal of effort making sure that Mothman has what can only be described as a seriously rockin' ass. Look at this taut sumnabitch! Fallout 76 made Mothman very mysterious and creepy, but I wonder now if this is simply because they lacked the courage to make him swole.
Better still is how at this point Noah's captured footage shows him circle around the statue to reach out and touch the Mothman's shiny metal butt.
Earlier in the travelogue he compares the Capitol Mall in Fallout 3 to what it's like in real life. In the game, it's a warzone crowded with enemies. In real life...
The invading army is food trucks. Dozen and dozens of food trucks, all swarming the area with standardized stadium pricing, loudly competing to be the one who sells your child a ten dollar strawberry milkshake.
Complaining about some dully anonymous buildings, Noah calls them "great glass hamsterwheels for bankers and investment brokers" only to brighten as he says that turning away from them he found a the kind of character-ful trait he was looking for: a genuine portal to hell under the freeway! (It's a doorway with graffiti calling it "Entrance 2 Hell")
The campus of MIT, which contains a dome prominently featured in Fallout 4's Institute, is closed to people who don't have the access cards to let themselves in. Noah, slightly drunk, wandered around the edges hopefully trying doors until a student just let him in, at which point Noah tried to look like he belonged, saying that as an overweight nerdy white guy that was pretty easy, though as a man who'd never gone to college he certainly didn't feel like he fit in.
[MIT] feels overwhelmingly professional, which I am not. I'm a weirdo who drove into town in a beat up Thunderbird, walked 12 miles, and had three shots of whiskey before coming in here to try to find something that I only knew from a video game.
He found the dome in a small library with its own lock, and rather than press his luck he just took a couple seconds of footage through a window and got out. Back out on the street he started laughing as he realized what he'd done.
I had snuck into the Institute just like in god damn Fallout 4. What I assumed might not be possible at all I managed with a positive attitude and a heavy buzz. Now, now I truly felt the Fallout Vibe. I was Wasteland scum, skulking about where I didn't belong, in the beating heart of American technology and education.
