Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

Actually, Assassin's Creed is black, blue, purple, gold for the past couple of games.

Hmm I wonder if Green Blue Purple Orange is WOW's invention in the mmorpg sphere or if it was a convention before them.

It does kind of feel like a natural colour progression. Curious how that works. Maybe someone more versed in colour theory could figure it out.

Wasn't it from Diablo first?

Honestly, most of those colour associations make sense, and are much older than video games. This video feels a bit like someone's first awakening to the idea that colours have strong symbolic and cultural associations that lead them to be used in certain situations over and over, independent of each other, because it is those associations outside of gaming, not the games themselves, that drive how colours are used in games.

As for rarity colours... Green feels like something is safe and easy. We use green for positive, low risk entries on a scale, so using them for low level items makes sense. Purple is traditionally associated with wealth and regality, so that denotes more expensive, rare, and valuable items. Blue is a good middle point between green and purple. Gold is associated with wealth, as well as winning (think gold medals), so that makes sense for the very best items.

And it's not that big a surprise that so many games come up with the same colours, since their artists consult the same colour theory guides, and have been taught to use colours the same ways.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 25th 2024 at 2:02:09 PM

Or in Layman's Terms: Colors are a thing that get USED.

Some games I played have red be the color of highest rarity. It goes Blue -> Green -> Purple -> Orange/gold -> Red.

That feels like an odd choice, red would suggest low quality if anything. I guess they needed something for "better than the best".

That's usually what platinum would denote (as being a step above gold), though I suppose there's little to distinguish it from silver if going by colour alone.

Red in that case carries connotation of "this is a super extremely deadly weapon".

Putting green above blue, now that is a complete heresy

Edited by Adannor on Apr 26th 2024 at 10:00:10 PM

I thought of platinum too, but as you say, that would be too much like silver.

I know that some ranking systems place Diamond above Gold, and then some have Black/Onyx/Obsidian above that, but that's mainly for rankings not rarity levels.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom & Phantom Fury | Fully Ramblomatic

We're back to the indies this week since the AAA releases have dried up faster than a Your Mom joke.

The first gets refreshingly to the point in its title: Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom. Someone in the Indie Game Naming Department must've been off the shrooms when this one came through. It's a frenetic old-school platformer with an extremely unsubtle premise: you play a taxi driving through insane environments, occasionally switching to an overhead style when you least expect it. Also, this one is really serious about its epilepsy warning.

On to Phantom Fury. I would snark about the Naming Department getting a fresh shipment, but it's a sequel to Ion Fury, so I guess it's alright. It's a throwback to early full 3D shooters with pretensions to complex storytelling, so the protagonist is a female version of Duke Nukem and the plot isn't quite up to Half-Life standards. Apparently there's a SiN cameo for the twelve people who remember that game.

Huh, looking at our article, there's a whole franchise going on there, including Bombshell of all things. I remember Yahtzee also not liking that one.

Edited by Fighteer on May 1st 2024 at 12:19:32 PM

Pretty sure "x goes y" is a pretty normal sentence you don't need drugs to come up with?

Yes, that's what I said. It's a callback to Yahtzee's EP/SR about absurd naming conventions.

Just announced on Second Wind's Discord: Starstruck Vagabond releases May 24. Time to start a thread for it? Or do we already have one?

Oh hey, I wasn't expecting it to be released so soon, considering Yahtzee's working schedule. Then again I haven't been following it too closely. I liked the demo releases so I might pick this one up at some point.

As for making a thread, maybe wait for a bit until the game is released and there's more interest.

Helldivers 2 | Fully Ramblomatic

Yahtzee would like us to know that he wrote and "filmed" this review before the Sony PSN fiasco, so don't expect it to get mentioned in the body. However, there is an addendum, so hang out for the end.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting him to review Helldivers 2 at all because it's an online-only multiplayer game, and he generally regards those in a similar manner to the pond scum in his shower.

Even more surprisingly, he likes it, and not just because it gives him the opportunity to shoot his editor in the face. It's a live-service, Skinner-box grind-a-thon but, unlike many other such games, doesn't pretend to be anything else. Points for honesty, at least. Humans are in a forever war with aliens because it's how we dispose of people who question The Democracy. It's a perfect setup for endlessly murdering gribblies whose planets we have no business on.

In summary: fun with friends, utterly intolerable solo or with randos, good gameplay and story integration. SHAME THEY FUCKED IT UP. Oh, that addendum. It even gets its own addendum after Sony's backtrack.

Edited by Fighteer on May 8th 2024 at 2:28:30 PM

Oh, That Darn Yellow Paint | Semi-Ramblomatic

Feels like we've talked about this one before, although I think it was in Design Delve, not Semi-Ramblomatic. I know Yahtzee has complained about it several times in his reviews, at least.

"Yellow paint" describes the habit game designers have of making hyper-realistic environments but then realizing that the player needs cues for where to navigate through them, so they settle on jarringly out of place highlights. Yahtzee dubs this "Corridor Climbing" because it's basically railroading the player through a linear path in defiance of what the visuals suggest they ought to be able to do.

It's the illusion of freedom. Why even bother having these lush environments if there's only one way to navigate them? You might as well just set the game in a linear corridor. Or make a platformer, more's the point, which is where all of these mechanics evolved from.

2D platforming tried to become 3D and stumbled over the fact that precision is impossible if you can't see your legs. From there we got third-person 3D platforming, while first-person adopted parkour, but somehow everything in the AAA space has congealed on this godawful "no way to fail, just press a direction button on the obviously climbable thing" approach.

Yahtzee's solution: play indie games.

Edited by Fighteer on May 9th 2024 at 11:38:50 AM

Eh, I see it as a non issue, really.

"Oh No, Yellow Paint that shows where I can climb, oh, the horror. I can't have full freedom of movement everywhere on every single game."

The point is that it's incredibly harmful to immersion in games that are supposed to be all about that. Who went around the world map of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth painting all the grab points? Who paid them for it? Why do we never see them?

I'll take super flashy handholds on the sides of cliffs over "Follow the compass to Designated Story Beat Q".

Didn't Design Delve already do a video on that? Seems a bit redundant.

Ughh, I hate those modern compasses... Just give me a proper map, already.

Edited by Redmess on May 9th 2024 at 7:46:46 PM

Immersion breaking yellow paint that shows me that a cliff is climbable, or spending 15 minutes trying to climb a perfectly climbable rock face that isn't one of the designated but unmarked climbable rock faces. What a hard decision...

But yeah this sounds like something a twitter expert with enough of a following to gaslight themselves into thinking they're a big deal would complain about without understanding why things are done the way they are.

Edited by CryoJNik on May 9th 2024 at 2:56:00 PM

Yeah,sometimes players need a big flashy sign saying "You can climb this!Immersion has to take a backseat,I've been there multiple times

Edited by Ultimatum on May 9th 2024 at 8:59:41 PM