The Details Racing Games Want You To Ignore
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2024
- #burnoutparadiseremastered #burnout #ambient #liminalspace #analysis
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This was a fun one for me and was my first time trying a totally improvised video essay. It didn’t go exactly as planned and required some reshoots but I still think it’s a great topic and a great video. What are your thoughts?
I'm enjoying this type of video Austin! I think it's a little more casual in nature and therefore a little cozier😊
anything thats not skyrim
very good!
It was wonderful, a great topic for sure with your usual fun execution
one offs on the random shit that pops into your brain are great. do whatever you wanna do - the audience will follow
My older sister always ignored the races when we played the need for speed games as kids so she could go 'house shopping' and pick out where she would live in that world. It used to drive me crazy but when I got a bit older I found myself doing the same thing and making up my own little stories and characters when I got tired of racing
That is so cute omg.
oh yeah i loved just looking at the places in need for speed. the hillside in underground 2 and the parks in most wanted i really liked just stopping at
I did a similar thing when I played Duke Nukem 3D and Driver 2 as a kid (who had no business playing video games with violence, swearing and near-naked women in it). In Duke3D, I'd pretend to go to the bar or go and see a film or pretend that I was an employee opening up the subway station in the morning. In Driver 2 I'd just cruise around the city, maybe pretending to be a taxi driver or driving to and from work or something.
Was there more "fun" to be had playing the game as intended? Sure I guess. Did *I* have fun driving around just seeing the sights? Absolutely.
I'm probably overdue for another "don't play the game, just cruise around town and look at stuff"..
@@Unkraut Underground 2 city is still my favorite place in the entire series, especially when you can look at the city below from one of those hills, at night when it rains and it makes the lights shiny so bright it's such a good mood, especially if the song Unwritten Law is playing at the moment. I just love to park my car and look at the city from there.
@@SolidIncMedia I did something similar in Driver 3, in the Istambul level I would like to ride the train and look out at the window and pretend I was riding to work or something. lol
I love how your channel is basically "Instead of playing a video game, let's just stop and look at it."
...
Just look at it!
Something we should all do a lot more often, I think. Just stop and take in the vibes.
@@theblah12 We all need to stop living, and start vibing. Ya feel me, san?
Honestly I thought everyone did this? Especially in open work games
@@redwiltshire1816 same but everytime i asked somebody about doing that they never do it theselves. I personally don't like playing a game and not actually exploring it and looking at it. It tends to make my gaming experience really long tho, usually, but also really detailed and interesting.
10:10 That machine is called a pallet jack. It's basically a hand-pushed, hand-pumped equivalent to a forklift, used to move large amounts of goods that have been stacked onto shipping pallets. I use one at work to move bulk samples about. It's absolutely the sort of equipment I would expect to see in that sort of situation (in my job, a lot of people spend break times very close to the loading dock due to the easy access to fresh air).
Some stunt people use them like a kick scooter. I wonder if there is already a game about this.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 I've ridden a pallet jack or 2 in my day. Real easy to jackknife and crash.
@@flyingdeathcatsgoagreed, riding the pallet jack is a bad idea - BUT if you're looking for "unsafe" ways to have fun at work and haven't loaded your coworker onto a dolly and driven them around, I highly recommend it
I can't even call it a machine lol it's more like a tool
how you afford internet is you do that low skill work
The billboards in Remastered replace actual for-sale ad space in the original release, up to and including ads for the Obama campaign. Burger King, the clothing brand Diesel, XM radio shows, and car brands, all bought space.
That’s amazing
Am I crazy or did they, for the PS3 version, have billboards that integrated your PS Home avatar? I remember the shock of seeing my guy reclining in a faux cologne ad but now I can't find any evidence that they actually did this.
@@funx24X7 Can't say for sure but it sounds plausible.
@@funx24X7 the 360 version did that too I'm pretty sure.
dude i forgot about this. thank you. holy shit
Wtf am I doing
Do you know, now?
Bro same lol
You figured it out yet?
Finding the best channel on TH-cam :D
We're learning (KNOWLEDGE)🤯
I feel like the Tony Hawk games are ripe for this kind of analysis. Can't tell you how much time I spent in American Wasteland and Underground 1/2 just wandering around and looking at stuff.
One of my favorite pastimes was going into the park editor and just building towns, always designating one spot as "my house." Even figured out a way to clip inside of the place-able shack so I could just sit in there and hang out.
It warms my heart to learn that other people also did this kind of thing back when
Haha I used to do this with the EA Skate games, so much focus in those games was on skating ofc, so the fact they were set in big open world cities meant there were so many weird corners of the map + little details that were there as filler, and never meant to be skated on or looked at. When I built parks in the park editor in the 3rd game I always made sure there were places for my skaters to sit, eat, sleep etc 😂
Edit: sorry I have ADHD and do not perceive punctuation when I type, added some commas for you.
The 1/2 remake had some old Neversoft blood in the dev team and the art direction was incredible. They managed to take levels made for the PS1 and update them to an 8th gen standard with the collision detection and level layout barely changed. And if you play with the soundtrack off you can really notice how good the ambient sound design is, especially in the Mall level.
I used to explore THUG2 SOO much as a kid, I especially loved the funny end-game outdoor punk skatepark level? With the hill? I have no idea what it was called it was like skatetopia or something but. All of their city maps were also super fun, spent hours exploring Boston and Barcelona. That era of tony hawk maps are just so fun.
I definitely tried to re-create my high school in THPS 2 and other parts of my hometown to varying degrees of success
When I was a kid I once tried to properly follow traffic laws in GTA 4. It's funny because that's when the simulation breaks down, just like if you look closely at these environments. Other cars ran red lights and stopped on greens, and I eventually got a Wanted rating for a car accident that I didn't even cause.
Haha yesss, I tried doing that too. I remember it being verrry difficult to not get into an accident, no matter how hard I tried, and since there isn't a fully designed traffic light/flow management system, you just hit a bunch of random red lights that last way too damn long. It became so painful that I ended up rage quitting my own simulation and rampaging on people and the city harder than I would have otherwise.
Dougdoug actually has a video of trying to follow all the laws in gta (albeit his is very chaotic cause of mods and antics) on a set drive across the city, which you might find interesting idk
This reminds me of one small part of the book Fahrenheit 451. In that dystopian future, they describe that billboards have had to be stretched out to a very high degree. The reason being, the cars have gotten too fast to read the original billboards. With racing games, it's the opposite of this. Instead of making things longer so you can purposefully focus on them while driving, they use the fact that you won't look at the details so that they can make less environments.
I should read that book
@@any_austin It's an alright read. Definitely a classic. Not my favorite, but it proposes some neat concepts!
@@TransfemMarta The book reinforces the idea that Ray Bradbury is much better at short story writing lol
There’s a fantastic graphic novel adaption of it, which I recommend over the book to be honest
@@Brib8888 I can agree with this, haha. He had some interesting ideas, but it just sorta seemed like a big collection of interesting thoughts. “What if evil robot dog?” “What if people hated knowledge?” “What if firefighters made fire instead of stopping fire?” They are all good stand alone ideas, but together? It’s all kinda mismatched.
Just wanted to leave a comment to appreciate this kind of content your channel is a goldmine for random video game shit like this that no one else focuses on I love it
This sort of content should become a YT genre.
@@octavianpopescu4776 It kind of is at this point
@@octavianpopescu4776 AFAIK there is an art genre of in-game photography, where they try to plan screenshots of strange scenes (sometimes with multiple player posing as actors).
The best part is that it's not quite random. Everything has a theme and everything relates to each other. I love this type of stuff but I just can't put it into words to describe exactly what it is... and he does it. Phenomenally.
the content really hits me with nostalgia, since I exactly used to do these mundane things in video games (even now). Like in GTA San Andreas I remember going into the suburbs and going to the shops and houses just to explore. To read the posters up on the wall and see if the apartments have air-conditioning units on their windows or something. lol
something I started doing in gtav recently was go around looking for any phone number written somewhere in the world. I had to use my in game camera to be able to zoom in far enough to see the numbers in most instances. on billboards, fliers on poles, various company vehicles, posters and pamphlets inside buildings, and sometimes rubbish. there's one billboard advertising a clown and if you call the number it'll say it's no longer in use. that was the only one that was different, as far as I could tell if you called any of these other phone numbers you'd hear one of three responses: 1 it gets picked up and hung up immediately 2 a guy tells you to stop calling/pranking him or 3 what I can only describe as the worst machine noise ever. those and the clown number response are all different than if you just called a completely random number where it would say the line is busy. one detail I didn't notice until I started doing this, was that on the door of a taxi and on the back of the seat visible in first person when you're passenger, the number for the company is there and it works. there's no need for the player to have this information though, cos all three characters already have it in their contacts. but that was what made me start looking at other company vehicles too. I'm still investigating so maybe I'll discover more things idk. if anyone else wanted mess with this, remember the beginning of the number will always be (323) 555-whatever as 323 is apparently the los santos area code and fictional numbers start with 555.
You can actually call any contact in the game as long as you know the number they have. Most interestingly, this includes the weird girl you can meet as Trevor and make booty calls with. The game doesn't check if yoy've met her, and she will answer as if you already got her number. I think it also has some speedrun application as well.
@@ohno5507 oooh that is interesting, though I knew you could contact characters by dialing the number manually, I was mostly talking about the numbers that have nothing to do with the story and exist only for worldbuilding and/or shiggles
what you said makes me think though, ik that it's possible to have trevor and franklin "meet" before they're actually introduced to each other but idk what happens if you call michael or trevor as franklin right after his first mission
10:10 That's a pallet jack. It makes it easy to lift and move heavy pallets.
The prongs go in the bottom of the pallet, and it uses hydraulics to lift it up off the ground, above wheel level.
and stuntmen enjoy using these like a kick scooter.
I’m sitting here watching an Any Austin video. If he had his way I would ignore the hair clips in his hair. How crazy is that?
I thought they were cell phones
I thought they were those clips for chip bags. "Chip clips", as they are sometime known.
@@GMoDiLLa being ignorant is fine, but if that’s the case don’t comment, you don’t get a participation grade
@@paul4000 how am I sposta know I’m ignint if I don’t got chums like you to lmk?
@@paul4000being an ass is fine, but you as well don't need to comment
Lmao just got done watching your GTA 4 power line video and then went back and watched some of your older vids. Kinda cool to see that details like that were ideas for videos for months in advance.
when i was a kid playing need for speed with my brother, my fav thing to do in the game (outside of spectacularly crashing my car) was to leave the road and drive in a the countryside until i found a nice enough spot where i would just stop and just…. soak the atmosphere in. i spend way too long looking at random shit in this game lmao
so real
What game did you play most like this?
@@maxwellmorgan uh?
@@maximum7790 Which NFS games did you play in that way?
NFS 2 se I bet
fun fact. the vehicles driving around in burnout games are remote controlled. burnout is an entertainment media company that focuses on vehicle based destruction in closed circuit environments. (there used to be screams when crashing into cars but that was removed)
Burnout Paradise had one of the most surreal, uncanny moments in gaming: On PS3 they integrated your PS Home avatar onto the in game billboards (if you had one). It somehow both added and removed immersion at the same time. I can't even find search results that prove they did this so it could just be a mandela hallucination.
I was living in Switzerland at the time I played BP and I distinctly remember getting a McDonalds cheeseburger ad in German on one of the billboards...in my English language Xbox 360 copy of Burnout. They were definitely up to some strange activities back then.
@@AVirtualDuck
Ah yeah, 360 games were especially notorious for doing that! Personally thought it was the neatest way to do ads in a game, if you're gonna do them at all. I believe the first couple, if not just Saints Row 2 did the same thing with in game billboards. 😀
I know that the need for speed most wanted 2012 game had avatars on billboards, so I assume same devs, same features
Remember the Obama billboards in the demo?
@@Rad-Dude63andathird EA was absolutely shilling sponsor space on billboards and other surfaces during the PS2 era, and its by and large tolerable since its not intrusive, of course there's advertising there, why wouldn't there be?
San Francisco Rush and San Francisco Rush 2049 are among my all time favorite racing games and they were on the N64. It's more than racing, though. You actually unlock some things by exploring the tracks Midway has created and finding keys and coins. Both games even reward you with cool secret areas that you would never see if all you did was stay on the obvious paths and shortcuts and race (meaning you really have to go out of your way to see and collect everything).
That also reminds me of the time I made a track in ModNation Racers that wasn't really meant to be raced on, but for a chillout spot (It was a simple loop with an exit leading to the rest of the terrain). I added some secrets and even had a small challenge to "collect" the sheep. I miss that game.
As someone who has worked on a QA team for a racing game, I have spent a lot of time looking at this kind of stuff. This really captures the heavily curated falseness that is very particular to racing game environments.
"Heavily curated falseness", I love that phrase! A lot of that goes into building theme parks as well.
I love not driving in driving games. My siblings and i would race backwards a few laps in mario kart and then flip around and see if we could beat the easy computers before they finish their race. Saw a lot of detail that probably wasn't meant to be focused on lol
Some of my favorite gaming memories is being a kid and exploring the map of need for speed underground with my cousin.
It accomplished nothing, but we just wanted to explore and see the world.
You do a great job at capturing the emotion of those feelings and that drive, that is unique to video games?
Not exactly the same, but i remember reading a story about a guy who had his grandpa play LA noire because it was it was a time capsule for him. He drove sround and pointed out places to his grandson.
i did exactly the same with my brother on need for speed! (i mean i did that while he watched me and begged me to give him his turn on the controller)
I remember when I was younger I'd try driving into saloons and stuff in one of the maps in MX vs ATV Unleashed. I'd usually end up falling off of the bike but this topic in racing games in particular takes me back to that game specifically.
@@SoIsticeMX v. ATV were great for this until they ruined the franchise
I noticed this when playing Need for Speed Most Wanted. The downtown has unreachable skyscrapers, there are highway side apartments, farms and other buildings that can’t be reached, there are highway overpasses that connect to nothing and there’s apparently only one road that anyone can use to go in and out of the city, and it’s blocked off by construction, lol.
i love the sort of raw literalist outlook you like to have in video games, like "what if this place were reality? does this snack machine make sense? does this hallway make sense?"
When me and my brother were little and playing trackmania (old version on a CD) we discovered we could drive off the course and into the water. In every course there was a background scenery of a few islands/hills and we would travel to one of them, which we called volcano island. It took around 20 minutes of pressing the forward key to drive the way to the island through the water. And when we arrived we would drive around the island for a couple minutes, trying to climb the mountain, before the car ultimately tumbled, landed on it's back or side, and we had to click back to the last checkpoint on the course. 20 minutes from the island. It was always worth it for some reason.
I'm especially surprised that Trackmania Turbo (by Ubisoft) still allows you to exit the map like this.
Even more fun, there's no barrier to the map at all, and if you hold the accelerator down for 10-15 minutes you start seeing floating point rounding errors and all the graphics start breaking.
This kind of thing has been on my mind, lately, playing Splatoon 3. There's a huge amount of detail on the multiplayer stages that you really don't have time to appreciate during matches. A ton of attention seems to have been put into the design, to allow players to quickly interpret the environment as a bunch of surfaces relevant to painting and traversing them. When I use Recon Mode to just hang out and explore a stage, though, I notice details, decorations, or realize what some part of the level geometry is actually meant to be, that I've been rushing past so many times.
Putting that much extra detail that many people won't notice during play seems like a cumbersome, and possibly very counterintuitive thing to prioritize along side of making sure the visual language is so mechanically clear, but it's really impressive how well it works in that game.
There's also examples of the lower detail areas you're meant to ignore, but in Splatoon those are usually locations you can't actually reach. In-bounds areas seem to be consistently filled with little artistic embellishments.
The splatoon 1 plaza floored me with it's detail. Every vending machine was plugged in to an outlet. Each shop had a visible sensor for their automatic doors. The mailbox had a sticker on the side that was torn in half from the little door being opened.
YES
I spent 30 minutes just walking around Robo ROMen once - there are robots working with Jellyfish chefs, trying and failing to get past each other in the halls, and one perpetually out-speeding a poor Jellyfish worker trying to catch up to it to give it the ramen bowl it's supposed to be holding!
There’s a real art to making game environments that feel like a real, lived in world without compromising on gameplay legibility.
CS2 is another great example with a ton of details in its maps that very few players will stop to look at but really help sell the vibe of the place. It’s really interesting watching analysis videos of the maps and seeing how the careful placement of objects help guide the player down corridors or act as “soft” barriers between the playable area and the out of bounds, without feeling contrived or out of place.
Funnily, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 is the game that made me discover the art of just slowing down, turning off engine sounds/music and exploring the scenery. That game has a lot of unremarkable and interesting places.
But what I liked were the spots that emit sounds you usually only hear in passing. One spot in the mediterranean tracks was just an italian mum arguing with about 5 kids over and over
The hair clips really elevate the look 👌
i've been inspired by austin to wear my morning hair clips while running errands
Tucked in shirt looks sharp!
@@sierranicholes6712 going full circle to the 50s housewives in their curlers and scarves
That's the parts he wanted you to ignore !!!
Austin out there inventing looksmaxxing before looksmaxxing was even a thing
As a child, my friend and I would play in the Mario Kart Wii racetracks. We wouldn't race and we'd turn off CPUs. We would actually roleplay little stories for characters that worked at Coconut Mall for example. We noticed all these little details and it was always exciting to explore the maps in a new manner
Back when MKWii was new, there was a Wii channel made where Nintendo would challenge players to collect coins scattered around a given level, among other things. One of the challenges given was collecting coins in Coconut Mall, and honestly the amount of detail they put into drivable areas that aren't even part of the map was pretty cool to see.
I did that with my sister too! We played hide and seek on the track while roleplaying our character.
6:50 There is some evidence to support that the massive parking lots grocery stores tend to have may have a meteorological effect on the local area that tends to produce objectively aesthetically pleasing views iirc
When you mentioned GTA IV, it made me think about how GTA San Andreas does it. In some places, they really go above and beyond to make things be right, but then other times it looks like they just didn't bother at all. Kind of makes it even more fun to explore, because now it can be rewarding in two different ways.
San Fierro is so nonsensical in parts it feels like an alien planet
I spent a few days in NYC... Then fired up GTA IV. Blows me away how miniature star junction feels.
@@Journey_to_who_knows And yet, I've seen scenes in movies that were instantly recognizable as San Fransisco to me, despite my only exposure to SF at the time being San Fierro.
Always find it interesting when you can notice the areas of the game that had the most development resources and polish and the ones that had less work put into them. It pulls back the curtain slightly, like seeing the individual brushstrokes on a canvas.
Like with Skyrim where feels like as you go further away from the starting area or from the major towns the placement of objects starts to feel sparser and less naturalistic.
The edges of the map in particular are a huge vibe, to some extent it feels like they put deliberately less detail in those areas to discourage players to explore too close to the invisible walls, as a way of telling us that there isn’t anything interesting over there.
Need For Speed Underground 2 has an arch made in memoriam to one of the devs who died
This brings to mind the quotes from developers of Outer Wilds, specifically in the NoClip making-of documentary. They tried to design the world(s) so that if you see something interesting, there should be something interesting there, and you generally won't find anything hidden in visually-uninteresting areas. (With the exception of things that are explicitly designed to be hidden until discovered via other means.)
If only the devs of outer worlds thought like that lol.
If Tom Scott was from the Midwest 0:06
legendary comment
Really cool premise for a video. Well done man!
This means a lot coming from you, I appreciate it! Hit me up if it ever makes sense; I’d love to pick your brain about games since I wouldn’t have guessed this was your watch niche.
The first game that evoked this feeling for me was Motorcross Madness 2. Despite not actually having a free roam mode, there were no barriers on the race tracks so there was nothing stopping you from exploring the map. For some reason, they included a button that let you cycle the camera between all the AI vehicles. You could forget you're even playing a racing game and just watch the strange facsimile of rural living from the perspective of a bus, a train, a biplane.
(Of course, everyone knows this game from the way it launches you back into the map when you go out of bounds, lmao)
MCM2 did have free roam, that was how come you could get the out of bounds launch. It had so much free roam I didn't know there were races in it when I was a kid.
@@lurkio804 As far as I remember, the "free roam" was just loading up a race or stunts mode and then ignoring the actual goal and going off track. I'm with you though, I don't think I ever did the real races.
i think i remember recommending "odd and unusual places in midnight club 2"...i'm glad racing games got a video :)
The reason "indefatigably" may have felt like the worst word is possibly also because that's now how it's pronounced. It's typically pronounced in-deh-fat-eh-gah-blee. The narrator in Darkest Dungeon actually pronounces it in one of his lines, and it's pronounced the same in both British and North American English (individual accents notwithstanding).
Idk about GTA4 but in Red dead redemption 2 I saw a video this guy followed the power lines from the Saint Denis across to all the settlements with power. Ones without power lines only use oil lamps for lighting
I love the attention to detail of the ecosystem in that game. Just observing nature going about its business, the animals doing their thing. And, of course, that they went above and beyond and made the horses defecate. Attention to detail!
@@davidvaughan5512 Even realistic horse testicles lol I wanna know who was like "We gotta make em shrink in the cold!"
Also, the slapdash greenscreen work is a vibe. The sloppy overlays, the spooky digital shadow haunting your shoulder.
Austin you consistently have a way with humanising video games. Especially what you said at the end here, to just go back once you are done, and reclaim the joy of just wonder at what's going on in the game you are playing. It brought me back to my childhood playing fucken Cars Maternational of all things. I'd spend hours just driving into walls, trying to explore and see what random shit was in the shop signs, or to see if the main street was 1-1 for what was in the movie which I'd seen ad nauseum. You are an absolute legend when it comes to humanising Austin, Absolut Legend.
I too love walking slowly in games you're not supposed to. Spiderman is a fun one. A lot of repeat shops, but you'll also find something as small as a squirrel scuttling about!
GTA IV is one I really spent over a hundred odd hours walking slowly. You're right that they put so much detail into the world and I wanted to experience it fully and slowly.
you always get me thinking about these video game spaces a little differently :) plus you’re a very witty writer-“books have terrible graphics” and “these games are meant to be viewed at 80mph” are very snappy and imaginative and effective things to say
I was playing Tears of the Kingdom today. I went toward a shrine from an angle you were surely never meant to do it from. Basically, I scaled a mountain on the shoreline from the shore side and trecked along the remarkably empty mountainside to the shrine. And, as I did this, I thought of Any Austin remarking on the fact that this was a superliminal location that only existed because other locations existed.
I absolutely love this concept of slowing down and spending time in unintended places in video games. I used to do it constantly in Zelda Twilight Princess as a kid, but yeah, as an adult I never let myself stray from the video game objectives! Awesome video.
Holy shit you blew up. I haven't checked out your channel for a while, but I like seeing what you're up to now and then. We spoke on Patreon sometime 2016, I'm glad you're still around.
Ye it’s crazy. Really appreciate that you were around back then.
@@any_austin ♥️
10:54 next time I beat a racing game? Bro no this is the first thing I do in almost alll games. Especially racing games. Me and my bro spent hours in calamari desert tunnel and that donkey kong bridge. I even recognised that parking lot 😂😂
10:12 That is a pallet jack. That guy is taking his 15 minute smoke break before going back to moving pallets around that warehouse.
I literally stop and read billboards and storefronts in racing games and I’m glad I’m not the only insane one
Hey Austin, you prolly wont read or even see this, but I just wanted to let you know that I am currently watching every single video of yours (starting from the oldest) while im on a long trip through South Africa. Please never change and always do what you enjoy doing! (currently at the COD:Ghosts Eggbusters EX episode) I hope its okay btw if I download a couple episodes as I dont always will have internet but I make sure to load the video first so in case of an AD pops up you still get the money for it!
It’s 10 years of content keep me posted
@@any_austin Promise!
Keep this energy going forward, Austin. Never speed up. Stay slow, friend.
Great topic! The part about grocery store parking lots having great skies is funny to me bc i worked at a grocery store for a summer and I fucking hated that I’d be stuck inside bagging or pushing carts or whatever while this beautiful sunset was there watching me. It felt mean, like take me with you !!!
in games as well as in life my favorite thing to do is explore the map and find the odd nooks and crannies and distant unknowable things. these videos are a delight
Austin’s finger wave curls have been COOKING I can’t wait to see the results they’re going to be amazing
Since I was a kid I've always hoped to see the Burnout Paradise map brought to GTA with mods. Being able to get out of the car and just explore those huge empty spaces made my mind fly. I can see that same excitement in your videos, the Assassin's Creed and Mario Kart Wii ones were phenomenal but this one really resonated with me. Thank you so much, I hope to see way more of this in the future. And please don't shy away from the camera cause it really makes the videos more engaging. Cheers!
I've been playing vehicle levels in Halo games on foot to see how different it feels and I've noticed so many strange and odd things in my journeys. Like that part in Halo 2 after the tunnel segment when you're supposed to hop in a warthog and drive it to the Scarab boss fight, that big open grassy park like area is bizarre and magnificent and I never noticed in when zooming around in a car, how unsafe and non OSHA compliant all the structures in that area is. I also found two easter eggs I never knew about, a weird alcove with no doors or windows on the side of a building that no human could reach without a ladder as it's like 8 feet up and the only thing in it is a trash can sign, with no trash can. Also a billboard thing with propaganda on in it trying to get people to join the army, as well as one telling people to rise up and fight the aliens who are at that moment invading Earth. That last one is especially funny to me because nobody would bother to stop and read it, they would be running for their lives and some propaganda guy is just sitting in his little office typing crap out when people are dying and getting blasted nearby.
Burnout Paradise is probably my favourite game, played it on XBox and now on Switch.
I like how the objective of finding all of the yellow gates and billboards forces you to look at the surroundings more, especially when you get to the end and only have a few to hunt for.
I really appreciate that you share a sense of analysis for the logistical facts of these worlds with me. I often find myself playing games and examining my surroundings and wondering just how much or how little thought has been put into the hows and whys of the world I'm inhabiting as I play. I look at the buildings and wonder how goods and services are exchanged and carried out from that building. How feasible is it for any given object to actually enter that building and how is it transported to a given room? is there equipment present that makes such things possible? stuff like that. You add another layer of perspective to my curiosity and that means a lot to me. Thanks man. Keep going. I love your stuff and the way you seem to think.
While I prefer to play mostly older games, it also makes me a little angry that e.g. in 3D Fahrschule (3D Driving School) by Sybex most houses lack front doors. Its not the coarse graphics in general, but it just feels loveless when they have walls of some repeating window texture but no door.
I will always love the Crew 1 and the details in the environment I constantly would stop to snap pictures in interiors clipping through building with the camera so many little details and cool areas.
Dammit it's so unfortunate that game is just unplayable now
This takes me back to the early days of Burnout Paradise, where the community was thriving with ways to go out of bounds, sharing glitches to show you how to get to places that you aren't supposed to be - and there were *A LOT* of them. It's insane how I recognize most of these places because of it.
The game does actually expect you to park. There's actually a scoring system for parking your car in burnout paradise, its just not for the lots, only for parking in the street; you should try it out.
The DOS game Car & Driver had a parking lot with parked cars starting to drive away and you could train parking. But collision detection was so bad that you could drive through the back wall of the supermarket etc. without damage.
10:11 That is a pallet jack! It's like a small hand forklift.
That thingy in GTA4 is a pallet jack, just meant to be a handheld forklift without needing classes to use
Idk how many hours I spent as a bored kid just staring at this exact kinda stuff. Love this channel so hard
In Ridge Racer Unbounded, you can combine tracks from different settings in the track editor. They get a pass because, duh, making sure every track connects flawlessly within it's outer boundaries is more time consuming than making sure they connect as a racing track, but you can connect two tracks from different selections, that creates a dead end road out of bounds. My PFP is actually from that buildable, as I've taken this using a glitch in the testing mode.
need that powerline type video fr
the "grocery store parking lot" phenomenon when it comes to the sky isnt so much the context of a shitty parking lot, but the context that everyone in US(outside of the pacific nw) lacks the grit and fun that would let them risk going on a vacation during a cloudy spring day instead of a clear summer one.
I like the idea that the people in the Pacific Northwest have the highest percentage of grit and fun in the US
What's really fun is when you do this in proper racing simulation games, not just the arcade styled stuff. You're much more limited in where you're supposed to be able to drive to, but if you look around over the fences and barriers surrounding the circuit, you'll start noticing oddities. Grandstands without entrances, secondary pit lanes with no support racing teams set up in them, no scrutineering bays in pit lane, a medical car parked outside what's meant to be the medical station... but no ambulance. No firefighting equipment on pit lane. Zipline cameras that don't follow their ziplines correctly. Marshalling posts with no way to get into them, and no marshals in sight during your active session. Marshalling access points with locked gates (they'd never be locked during an active session, in case they need to send a recovery vehicle in to collect a stricken car). In some older racing simulations, you'll see that the prat perches on the pit wall have computer screens and awnings, and sometimes stools, but there's never anyone sitting up there to monitor your progress during the session. There's no chairs in your pit garage for your pit crew to rest in while they wait between pit stops. There's no pit crew in your garage - they just magically appear from nowhere to service your car when you come in, then disappear, sometimes before you've even left pit lane. It all just starts getting a little bit weird. Maybe if you're not familiar with racing circuits and what makes them function, you wouldn't notice it, but when you grew up in racing paddocks, things start looking very strange when you go "off-mission" and start exploring instead of racing. It goes from convincing to completely bizarre. The world is a stage, and you are a player - you're not a racing driver, there is no team, there are no essential services.
Man Austin you are the one content creator that I always come back to, for years now. You speaking to the absurd beauty that exists at the boundary of our reality and digital worlds is wholesome and always somehow surprisingly thought provoking. Then you release a sly dry humor video about unemployment that somehow makes these NPCs and towns more alive. You always make my day!
this and your last vid have been real bangers. such a specific feeling that you appreciate the way it should lol. have you considered looking at incidental birds in various games?
The first game I ever felt the desire to explore out-of-bounds was Moto Racer (1997) for Windows 98 SE, that came with the Compaq Presario. Of course I couldn't, but looking at the environments outside of my narrow race track and wanting to get closer was one of the things that kept me going back to the game.
I remember playing a racing game called Baja: Edge of Control, something i didn't really understand about that game is why it had a free roam option since the maps where so "minimalistic" but I'm thankful it had that option because driving through those maps admiring the endless desertic landscape and encountering a small building in the middle of nowhere was so authentic
I love looking at all the little details on Mario Kart tracks.
Why are the Toad bystanders three times as large as Donkey Kong?
The billboards in burnout paradise were used for actual ads for real life products and services. I remember seeing Verizon ads and ads for new cars at the time. I dont know when they stopped doing this but when the game was at peak popularity EA did everything they could to squeeze money out of it.
10:22 That’s crazy I’m coming from that video
5:32 "I regularly come back here". I just... can't even comprehend saying that in my life in regard to a parking lot in a 2008 racing game.
As a kid I was obsessed with these exact details. I would stare at the buildings in Sonic Adventure 2 and try to look down the roads we run past, and stare at the Best Buy parking lot in NFS Underground 2 that we could never physically access. I wanted to know how "big" and "real" these gaming worlds were
"Whatever that machine is IDK" bro never worked retail 💀
10:11 that's a pallet jack, its used for transporting large amounts of pallets usually in warehouses but also grocery stores. I know this isn't important but I just found it funny because I've been doing blue collar work for a long time. Some are even electric so you don't have to lug 200+ pounds around :)
I don't want this content in my algorithm. I don't want to spend time watching this. But you did it. Your random nonsense explorations won my heart and made me subscribe.
6:47 I used to be a cart guy at target and I thought I was the only one taking these pics, now I’m convinced every sunset we see online was uploaded by a cart attendant
You are a true gem. I've always seen and felt the poetry in games that you don't always see emphasized. Sleepy swimming in game oceans as far as I can go. People watching in gta just flying around saints row. Looking at vines waving in the wind and water effects in tomb raider. Lingering in swap fog red dead redemption 2, crouching in tall grass in the last of us. Staring at gorgeous Starry sky's and the clouds float by and mechanical beats stomp through desert landscapes with their glowing red eyes and watching pollen float in the air as I stoop in floral foliage and take pictures. Looking at how the light would stream through the boarded windows in fallout 3 in the dim homes of cannibals. Yes so many sunsets too. Beautiful memorable quiet obscure moments. Riding my horse on a quiet night's sittng campfire when there wasn't much left to do in rdr. Lovely spaces to dwell in. You show case that and it gives me such a deep deep delight and satisfaction. Like your relighting a candle ive burned plenty and love but forget about. Thank you. ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ I can't wait to see you walk around gta the phone lines and employment check. Sounds hilarious. 😂😊
I had the exact same thoughts when it came this game and went around slowly trying to find and see all the things I missed at 80mph. This led me to exploring the rail lines that run through the game. As I tracked them I realised that where I had initially thought each accessible rail line was isolated from the others they were in-fact a fully connected rail network that still existed in-game, visible to the player, just with large sections inaccessible thanks to creative use of blocking props and triggers that removed you from the area if you got to close (or landed in there in a crash). Turns out there's a mod (the Burnout Vanity Pack) that once installed lets you turn off the removal triggers and lets you explore 'off-road' as much as you want, and it's possible to explore this large cut section of the game with ease. I recommend taking a look, it's quite cool!
Stuff like this is why I love doing everything but the main objective first whenever I play a video game. There's so much interesting stuff to look at if you stray away from the beaten path and if you take a moment to slow down and relaly take n the environments.
It's also why I hated this trend that was particularly bad in the early 2010's of railroading the player and nagging them as much as possible into continuing the main quest. Remember when games used to straight-up give you game overs if you dared to try and explore? What was up with that?
I hear ya 100%, I spend my days playing open world driving games and finding strip malls to idle at, colleges, hospitals, parks, anything like what you're talking about, I love that liminal feeling.
....aaaactually, as I recall, you *are* supposed to park in Burnout Paradise. There's a whole mechanic called "Power Parking" where if you whip an e-brake turn at high speed and slide in perfectly parallel between two cars, you'll get a pop-up congratulating you on how well you did and an achievement for pulling it off. Most people don't know about it because it's actually really hard to pull off and might only work you're connected to a multiplayer game?
You really don't know what a pallet jack is?
This is fantastic. Thank you for exploring these little things that my brain appreciates but I guess just didn't think other people noticed too, or that I didn't even consider exploring more deeply.
When I was a teenager I used to find little cozy places in games like Shenmue and Grand Theft Auto 3 and just leave them up on my screen to help me sleep. Little spots where the ambience and sometimes the music would coalesce into everything just feeling like here, in this spot, everything is OK.
You mentioned GTA IV being the first game you remember being vast in scope, AND heavily detailed, but I really really think you would appreciate the Dreamcast classic Shenmue. It's set in the small town of Yokosuka Japan in the 1980s, but it ended up going waaaaay over budget because they filled the whole game world with interactable, detailed, realistic details. In my opinion, it is truly the first 3D open world where they thought 'what if instead of making this puddle wider, we made it deeper instead.'
This reminds me of diddy kong racing. I did not play this game a lot, but I remember that my brother, his friends and I had found a nice place inside a shortcut in one the circuits. This place had a cozy and mysterious atmosphere, I loved it. Instead of doing the race, we were using this section of the circuit as a fighting arena. It felt like our secret club, kind of a fight club but nicer. I remember that i was a very young child and at that time a felt like a cat in the dark.
How did this hair clip thing start
I dont think anyone ever asked
This video really is a testament to the whole "video is actually way more interesting than it sounds" concept. It's peak TH-cam really
I like your videos. Thank you.
What an interesting video. I worked on a few arcade racing games close to 15 years ago now, and we did a lot of small things that added up. We focused on the first floor of buildings over everything else, as you could never really make out much detail on anything higher while driving along. For some alleys (since we were not an open world game), we'd collapse alleys to a narrow point and force the perspective to be more extreme. We also played with the frequency of the road markers, and width of the lanes to make the car go faster than they should. We'd also apply some fake motion blur in the road texture and so on.
Dude getting that JOJO pin in hair drip
I love doing this in games. I try to explore every bit I can.
That standing in thr middle of the road idea really hit. I used to turn on GTA3/Vice City/San Andreas, start my VCR recording and stand on a sidewalk before school, then come home and watch it to see what happened.
This is peak corner TH-cam. Keep it up.
Dont fail ever
Da fuq on yo head bro
11:02 really made me think of the Royal Raceway track in Mario Kart 64. I remember when I went off track once as a 10-year old, driving to Peach's castle and embracing the calm of the courtyard and felt like I was in Mario 64. Anyone else did this too?
I dont want to judge you but i am very curious if you didnt know what a pallet jack was
it is there for stunt people to be used like a kick scooter. 😉
I LOVE doing this! One of my favourite things I've found is in Assassin's Creed Unity, in the bottom left of the map- far from any mission you'll do- is a little vineyard, and there's a dude going about his day on his farm, and one of his animations is stomping grapes, for like 2 minutes straight. It's absolutely delightful
Test Drive Unlimited 2 is another great example of this. There are definitely some parts where the devs wouldn’t expect you to look, the only difference is a main mechanic of the game is a photo mode, so your also actively encouraged to find areas like this and take photos. I would say you should play it but sadly it’s been delisted off steam for awhile now
There are fan-made servers up and running nowadays