It's the last Fully Ramblomatic of the year! If you're enjoying Second Wind consider supporting us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Yahtzee's "list" of games will be the first episode of the new year!
Makes me curious if he's gonna have to roll in all the games reviewed on ZP because strictly sticking to FullRam would make a very tiny list this time around.
@@scarocci7333 yeah, no. To say nature hates us would be to ascribe far too much feeling to it. Nature is coldly apathetic to us. It doesn't care if we live or die. We are just easily broken toys for it to dispassionately shatter and destroy.
@@scarocci7333 nah mate, sickness, parasites, starvation, pain and natural disasters existed long before humans did. If anything, we made our own paradise, given that starvation and getting eaten are pretty rare occurences in 1st world countries.
As someone who lives in the tropics and has to check his shoes and bed sheets for spiders, scorpions and other creepy crawlies before use, I can confidently say that the vision of nature presented in Avatar could only exist in the mind of a city dwelling millionaire who's closest interactions with the wild is paying a few grand a couple of times a year to go on an all-inclusive guided safari tour and resort.
@@ChrisMattern-oh6wx Well, he is a deep-sea diver, which is involves encasing yourself in the most impenetrable bubble possible in order to keep nature away as you explore it, so...
I'm glad Yahtz brought up how weirdly obliging nature is on Pandora. You just know that if we had magical nerve ponytails that could connect to the minds of other living things there would be an entire ecosystem of horrible worms and other crawling things looking to infect our brains through it.
I mean most large life on earth has poisonous brain chemistry (low enough to fuction high enough to kill any parasite trying to subvert the brain) to prevent that sort of thing which is terrifying to think about when you remember that evolution takes a long time to adapt
Yep, Avatar is a weird one. I can't think of another property where the amount of money it makes compared to it's pop culture presence is so mismatched.
Probably because it's a very "in-the-moment" cultural experience. James Cameron's framing and VFX seem designed to watch on the biggest screen possible, so anything at home feels pedestrian compared to his other movies.
I remember when it first was in theaters and how people raved about it. I never had the slightest desire to see it, but part of that was the 3D hype and 3D movies make me feel sick. I also already wear glasses and really don't need to fuck around with a second pair.
I waited an watched on a streaming network and glad I did. The movie was so god awful, boring and derivative that I just checked put 1/4 the way through.
The only thing I remember about this franchise is how they got the composer to spend months to make alien music nobody has heard before. Then throw all it away because it was too weird. Feels like a franchise with alot of world building that wasn't showcased because they want to play it safe. So safe I can't remember a single thing.
Avatar is so strange, it's got a franchise, merch out the butt and a fricking theme park but I ask anyone if they like it and the most I'll hear is "well, I watched the films."
I found a let's player recently (initially via a different game) who's been playing this and was already a huge Avatar fan. Dude was absolutely loving being able to explore Pandora, so good for him.
I assume that Avatar and Pandora pushes some button in normal people's heads that videogames normally push for gamers. All the excitement just courses around us without touching us, due to the way algorithms and recommendations on the internet work.
I agree, I don't care about the films, but the theme park is impressive, and I rank the Avatar Flight of Passage as the best theme park ride I have experienced. Since 2018 I have had annual passes at WDW, DL, Universal Orlando, and Universal Hollywood, and Dollywood, so I have plenty to compare to.
@@nonyabidness8676 I have heard that it's one of those things that really, really, REALLY captured the imagination of certain groups of people, and I suspect they're the sort of people who would enjoy xenofiction if they knew it existed.
I do remember people going genuinely nuts over the first one. It's just weird when they stay dormant for over a decade and then come out claiming the film was some cultural touchstone. I saw it, of course. Thought it was pretty meh. It was more visually and technically interesting than anything. I'd almost compare it more to a fireworks display than a film. I'm not going to tell you not to enjoy it and I won't claim it isn't impressive, but I'm going to raise an eyebrow when you tell me the nuanced story and timeless message changed your life.
The thing I would actually like to see James Cameron make is a fake "Planet Earth" style nature documentary set on Pandora. It would show off the detailed world building Cameron made and I kinda think he would actually like making it.
Speaking as one of the legions of sewer people who did enjoy James Cameron's Avatar I can say with confidence that there's already a game that captures everything good about the film, adapts it into a fun gameplay loop and then grafts a bunch of other good stuff on it as well. It's called Subnautica.
@@schrodingerscat3741 the whole appeal of Avatar imo is "hey look at this gorgeous fantasy planet full of cool creatures, imagine going there" Subnautica is that but with cooler creatures and a really good story to boot
I've always said, my only metric for whether or not graphics in a game are good is whether or not I can tell at a glance what is and is not a thing. Used to be the graphics were so low-quality that they couldn't highlight the important stuff, but now apparently it's that they're so HIGH-quality that they can't highlight the important stuff. We are reaching the singularity of too-good graphics, and faster than I thought we would.
Art design and level design are really important. For all its other problems, The Last Of Us 2 gets this right. Those environments are incredibly detailed but things are easy to find even when you remove HUD elements.
As much as ppl hate on last of us 2, I can’t imagine a game looking much better than that. It looks like a movie. While still avoiding uncanny valley. Don’t know where else there is to go.
Right? The only thing the graphics NEED to do, at least in most cases, is (a) give the player visual cues to help with gameplay and navigation and (b) look like at least a rough approximation of the thing they represent. It's pleasant, even quite beautiful at times, when they go beyond that, but I play games for the engagement and interactivity, not because I want to stare at pretty pictures. If the only thing someone cares about is graphical fidelity they can watch a damn movie. I'll just be over here playing Sea of Stars or Hades, neither of which is a graphical powerhouse, both of which were clearly made to be fun and interesting.
Avatar reminds me of a book series called "The Damned Trilogy." In this series it turns out every advanced sapient species evolves on a tectonically dead Pangea planet. So almost every species evolves to be non-violent. Some vomit and pass out just from hearing about violence. There is a galactic war going between to major factions. One is mind control slugs controlling and engineering other sapient species. The other is a collocation of free sapient species called the Weave, I think. The Weave only has one species capable of fighting and even that takes a lot of training. Both sides are always on the look out for more allies. The Weave finds the Sol system and their minds are blown. Long story short humans are the only sapient species that is if not only okay with violence, they are adapt at it, and even they thrive in it. Humanity was on its way to being peaceful. However, the initial results of a few peaceful humans entering combat were so drastic that the Weave saw no choice but, to get humanity involved. Like two teenage homeless kids, a fisherman, and a pair of college students were able to break through the front lines of a stalemate that lasted decades.
The Damned is the exact bullseye of a guilty pleasure: the whole thing is such an unrepentant HFY ("Humanity, Fuck Yeah!") I can't take any of it seriously, but the writing is actually pretty good and finds enough fresh things to do with the concept that I can't just toss it into the Sturgeon memory hole.
@@SimonBuchanNz I don't come across a lot of published HFY. So it was really refreshing to read a series with Doom music starts playing when a human enters the room. Usually the humans are weaker.
@@XShrike0 honestly I find it hard to find the opposite: YFH. The most prominent (unless you count Avatar, I guess 😅) I can think of is Titan AE: a movie where humanity is mostly wiped out, and the climatic ending is we find a planet to live on. (I'm simplifying, of course) Even then, the plot is kicked off by a prophecy about humans of all things. Even in settings where pretty much every other species is humanity but better (like Star Trek), humans are still "special" and the "main characters"
@@johannesseyfried7933 I forget how it was worded, but it's effectively the "cause the prediction by attempting to avert it" trope which is generally a prophecy, probably why i remember it that way
Yahtzee makes a good point. For a franchise who's first film grossed over 2.9 billion dollars, you don't really see that many people actually care about it. I know I don't. And Yahtzee's rant about how demonized rhe humans are for not being peaceful and nature loving like the Na'vi are, when nature actively helps them instead of trying to kill them like Earth nature, is so accurate. Same goes for better graphics making it harder to find what you're supposed to do.
There are reasons for that, and one is that there were some people who watched the first Avatar movie and contemplated suicide so they could wake up as Na'vi. And wrote whole Tumblrs and Livejournals about it. Lots of them.
It's quite funny that this game is less fun than the movie tie in game released nearly 15 years ago. Seriously, the first Avatar game is janky as hell but still fun, it even let you play two seperate stories as human and Navi.
@@tortoiseoflegends4466 Between janky as hell but fun and technically sound but boring, I think the latter better captures the spirit of the Avatar movies, honestly.
The very fact that this is a major game release that I've seen advertised all over the place and yet doesn’t even have it's own dedicated TV Tropes page even after it's release is pretty emblematic of Avatar's pop culture impact despite it's huge success financially.
I remember first watching Cameron's Avatar and waiting for the big reveal that the whole ecosystem was genetically engineered by a precursor race and that the massive unobtainium deposit was their ship or something, what with the whole "plug and play brain stem with internet trees" thing. But no, it was just noble savages all the way down.
I liked how Yahtzee pointed out the hypocrisy of believing those who have had everything in nature be catered to them are superior to those that had to fight in an environment that was actively hostile for 1000s of years. Maybe a good spin-off story would be exploring the inherited mindset of humanity and the heroes are those who struggle against it rather than run away to a paradise like some of the main characters did in the Avatar movies.
That is funny, turns out its easy to love nature when nearly every animal in your environment can be made into a obedient Pokemon if you plug your hair into it.
I think that's kind of the point of the films though. Nature was catered to the Na'vi so humanity shouldn't have even bothered trying to go and conquer a place that was so blatantly not theirs
@eoinsmith15 I agree. The movie was " Dances with Wolves" in space. That's fine, and I don't expect anything subversive from James Cameron. I just feel like the whole "noble savage," "civilization is corrupt," and "humans are monsters" tropes are dull, nihilistic, and pure escapism. I want to see a story about people struggling for a better world. For all its cringe and earnestness, I think Final Fantasy 7 has better environmentalist, anti corporate, and anti colonial messages than Avatar.
I agree that there's a lot to explore with more grey areas but no, none of the humans who came to the planet are there because there is a need based on survival for them to be there. They were shipped there at massive expense by giant corporations trying to make even more giant piles of money. This isn't a situation of "oh we have to steal because we would starve otherwise", it's "wow that looks like mighty fine jewelry, mind if I take it? oh you mind, well then if you resist I guess I have good cause to kill and displace you". The problem with your logic is that if past difficulty in survival serves as justification for future brutality, then we would have to throw out basically all moral considerations ever, so let's not :) I still think a lot could be done with more morally questionable blue people though. Maybe a clan of them that immediately reacted violently to first human contact instead of first shaky but positive relations that then broke down rapidly as in the first movie. That would serve as an interesting jumping off point to discuss what response is actually the right one to pending colonialism.
@@eoinsmith15 But it wasn't? The point of the films wasn't "humanity overestimated their strength and took on a planet they shouldn't have," like you're seemingly implying. It was "the Na'vi are morally superior to humanity because they are one with nature, therefore they win." At least in the first movie (I haven't seen the second), the humans would have won then and there had they not had a traitor, who only turned on them because of the Na'vi's "moral superiority". Humanity didn't lose because it was an inherently unwinnable fight. They lost because the plot defined them as the bad guys.
Seconding that "It's apparently the most famous movie ever but I've never actually met anyone who is a fan or it or almost anyone who's actually watched it" feeling. The fanbase for it has to have an odd venn diagram that doesn't cross with anything in the world I care about.
3:57 This actually reminds me a lot of how I used to play MechWarrior 2 back in the '90s. I *always* kept the X-Ray mode on because it highlighted how damaged enemy Mechs' body parts were and where the cockpit was to snipe for an easy kill. (Yes, you could see how damaged the individual parts were on the little mini-model of a specific target on the corner of the screen, but why would I ever use that when I can see *every* Mech's current status, all the time, right where my crosshair was?) It was so useful that I actually forgot that the game had actual textures until I started watching Let's Plays of the game over a decade later where people didn't use it. And this was an early 3D game from the '90s, where unnecessarily gratuitous foliage or other environmental details in video games were exceedingly rare!
*Image enhancement engaged* That's why I always hated that Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries didn't have that function. It always made it so much easier to see what was going on, especially in nighttime missions. But its "Clan tech only" so the more Inner Sphere focused Mercenaries just had a low light/infrared mode instead. But all that did was add an orange filter to the screen, which really just made it harder to see anything. They even brought the color coded wireframe mode back in Heavy Gear, which was mostly the same codebase as MW Mercenaries.
To be fair, calling what Mechwarrior 2 had "textures" is being very generous. They were somewhere between roughly 8x8 to 16x16 pixel textures for the entire mech.
And that's what I do today in MW5. There's so much "shtuff" on the screen it can be difficult to even see the enemy to aim at. I'm in thermals mode half the time at least.
To be fair, maybe he did see them, but has completely forgotten about them. I remember being thoroughly entertained by the spectacle of both movies, but if you asked me to tell the story, I'd be hard pressed to tell anything definitive.
@@Lucarioguild7 Dances With Wolves only with a boring, monotonous and charisma-free lead actor. ... wait that's exactly Dances With Wolves. The second one is that but with evil whalers. Because of course the first thing humans would do after the setback of the first movie is not launch a full scale invasion, not drop asteroids on the Na'vi, not switch tactics to more diplomatic and insidious means but hunt sea life. Because apparently humanity in this universe are all Captain Planet villains.
@@zephyr8072 my favourite part about the whaling is it's for literal space whale brain juice for fucking ANTiI AGING CREAM. Not even something to help Avatars connect with their human pilots or even the stupid Unobtanium which solved the energy crisis on Earth. Anti. Aging. Cream. I love Avatar a lil more than ironically, but that was so stupid I burst out laughing in the theatre
@@GlitteryGecko I'm sure this was meant to be an allegory for real life poaching for medicinal cures and all that. Of course it makes no sense in universe for the humans to waste valuable resources on such a thing, especially when they imply that Earth needs to be evacuated soon. If anything the allegory would've been apt had they depicted Na'vi doing the whaling in order to sell the brain juice to the humans. But that would require a more nuanced take on these people other than a weird monoculture of one-with-nature hippies.
Seeing these comments reminds me of that test you're meant to try where you get people to name a character from Star Wars, then Marvel, then Avatar. I have a friend who used to share a flat with me who couldn't name a single character in Star Wars, not even the obvious ones like Princess Leia or Anakin Skywalker, but could name the lead Human character in Avatar (Who even I don't remember the name of). I was AMAZED when this happened. I couldn't believe it when I tried it.
To be fair, they must say “Jake Sully” hundreds of times throughout the second movie. Like they constantly blurt out his name in particular if I remember right. I couldn’t name a single other character though.
Imagine playing something like an Armored Core character in Pandora. I love nature documentaries, but the Avatar movie never looked like something other than fancy cartoon. The characters bored me and I only enjoyed the evil mech.
A game where you build a factory on another planet while killing the natives? It's called factorio. Riftbreaker also fits, if you want some additional angst from the protagonist about exploitation of the innocent nature.
I remember seeing the first avatar when it came out, I remember the theater being packed and all, but me and my uncle saw it and we kinda forgot about it in like an hour. Now i remember it as the first 3D movie I saw.
Honestly I just think back to Yahtzee's rant on the old channel about the "rise of the boomer shooter," and how this rising desire for clarity and simplicity is probably a direct response to games like this, where you can get lost amongst the debris of colorful grassblades and flowers, and there's so much for you to do, and then after about an hour frolicking through the woods get sick of it because the game hasn't given an honest to goodness fun challenge since you started.
Avatar just reminds people of the days they could go see a special effects blockbuster in a theatre and then not think about it at all until maybe a sequel came out.
I was very excited when I saw this because much like the movie, I've seen *literally nobody else* talk about or even mention this game, which I suppose is quite fitting for Avatar
The first movie was interesting because of Cameron and 3d movies being exciting and new. The second one I am convinced was only seen by so many because of the popularity of the first, people went to see it because they thought everyone was going to see it. A self driving hype train.
The Na'vi just can't carry a story they too morally good they have no fault or real conflict between each other. Also they just make the human stupidity evil.
The Na'vi having the effective lifehack of a one with nature easy mode is a good point that I think a lot of people missed in the movies. Na'vi. "I plugged my thing into its thing and now it's my loyal steed until I choose to release it. This took all of 5 seconds. I also literally have mother nature on speed dial and she regularly gives me clear unambiguous signals as to what's happening." Human. "We selectively breed out aggression and push desirable traits to the surface. This process is a constant effort that outstrips our own lifespans. Life is a constant unknowable vicious struggle with little to no warning about what is happening on the macro level unless we use technology." Movie: They are the same and humans are terrible.
@@SageWon-1aussie Aw dang, I see how you read it. I meant it as a parallel to how the Na'vi tame their animals. They get a 5 second brain meld and we have to go though the long and convoluted process of domestication.
I think the reason Avatar is so popular rests solely on the environment of Pandora and how cool it is. I remember watching the first film and LOVING it only to rewatch it later and be like...hmm...this seems more preachy than I remember it being. Then I realized that the first time I watched it I was just so enamored with Pandora itself that the story really didn't matter that much. I mean, who wouldn't give their left nut to live in a world like Pandora and be able to interact with it as the Na'vi do?
@@Chris.Pontius I was mid 20s I think? The 3D spectacle combined with how much I love CGI and animation made it really appealing to me. I mean, I definitely picked up on some of the messaging the first time I watched it, but I was so caught up in the spectacle that it didn't matter to me until I watched it again years later. Not to mention my dad told me it was basically Dances with Wolves in space and I couldn't get that outta my head. 🤣
@@Chris.Pontius I have no doubt that's part of it, but Avatar was a HUGE phenomenon when it came out. People were getting depression over Pandora not being a real place. I think it just happens that like me, after the novelty of it wore off, people just weren't into getting preached at.
Maybe because I was enjoying a white chocolate Digestive with a cup of tea or because Yahtzee and I have a shared annoyance for Avatar... but this feels like one of the best videos he has done. Not only the jokes (seagull revenge will stay with me forever), but it feels like there are a lot of amazing cuts / expressions / actions and variety between each of the stills.
With franchises this big you have to be VERY careful not to look anything like "their intellectual property". So you might as well just go all the way out on a pisser.
It took a while to really sink in for me, but shortly after coming down from the laughter at that "way behind on my have some actual fucking fun quota" line I realised I would have NEVER heard that line in that form with that level of intensity on the Escapist. Keep up the great work, y'all
I have seen both films but honestly, they fall through the mind like they're greased. The box art also makes me think of the Dragonriders (how to tame your dragon) instead, and I'm humming that trilogy's theme song.
I used to work in a cinema and I can confirm that buying up empty seats to pad ticket numbers happens all the time. That late night show where you thought you were the only one in there? All those remaining seats were bought by the studio. You can't trust box office "receipts" at all!
This sounds like a great news story! Incredible that the studios have kept this under wraps with how easy it would be to prove, especially given it happens all the time!
@@SimonBuchanNz It would happen at both the top and bottom selling films. The bottom ones would be trying to reach a certain number for quotas. I don't know exactly how it worked but they had to sell a certain number of tickets to not fuck the DVD release. And the top films would be trying to boost their numbers for the acclaim. Like, a big super hero film buying up a couple hundred seats so it could hang on to the number one spot for another week or claim it "sold out".
how much better would this be if all the na'vi kids were 100% totally into human culture and were "Rescued" by their birth tribe and there was a huge clash and you had a story where you could go with the humans back to earth because the corpo dude actually saw himself like a father figure but it required you to betray your tribe - it would be the "Evil" (selfish) ending, but how much more interesting of a story would that be
I think thats antithetical to what the entire franchise stands for. Which is to be a shittier dances with wolves. Loving the settlers who murdered everyone you know and destroyed your planet isnt even a clever ending, its just plain stupid
@@garfoonga1 Its not like there were not IRL historical examples of locals siding with the invaders for various reasons, hell, the entire conquest of the Aztec empire is series of double crossings, backstabs and outright betrayals by the different cities and cultures that were paying tribute to the Aztec, in hope of that in helping the Spanish they will be the next top dogs in the region or just had pure grudge. That played larger role in the fall of the empire than the superior weapons and the small pox epidemic in the early stages in the conflict. Granted Avatar is subtle as a brick to the face, but Stockholm syndrome can be a factor and people tend to have warmer feelings towards the caretakers who actually raised them than to their absent biological relatives, that are out there, somewhere.
@@garfoonga1 i feel like theres _some_ kind of potential there. your na'vi protagonist feeling more-or-less at home on earth, if only because they were raised there. then they start to learn more about their own culture and feel hollow, out of place, this potent sense of grief for the culture they never had a chance to embrace. maybe they feel anger at their human father figure, they understand now how _fucked up_ it was for him to cut them off from their history and culture, yet they can't bring themself to outright hate him because he _did_ raise them. he's the only family they've ever known, even if they know _now_ that their blood-related family is out there waiting for them. the ultimate conflict the player has to face would be "do you break free of the colonialist mindset youve been raised with and reconnect with your culture, or do you cave and stay with what's familiar, even if it dashes all hopes of learning more about your roots?" (i say this without really knowing anything about avatar as a series but like. it sounds like something you could get a decent theme or character arc out of)
@@garfoonga1 What the franchse stands for is already butchered by the simplicity and hipocracy if its narrative. These movies are already antithetical to their own message.
People clown on Avatar for being forgettable. But in all honesty, a mega franchise being an intentional theater experience that people enjoy and then don't become an obsessive nerd about is kind of refreshing these days. I also have no intention of seeing the new Avatar and don't remember anything but a Robotjox-esque fight scene at the end of the first one.
So vindicated by Yahtzee calling out the lead-brick-subtlety of these "humans are all thoughtless bastards, nature people are perfect pure little angels" plots- brings me right back to Octopath 2 and rolling my eyes so consistently and continuously throughout Ochette's entire story that you could have hooked my retinas to a turbine and supplied clean renewable power to a third world country EDIT: i don't actually know ANYTHING about Avatar LOL- if it is more nuanced than that in places then that's cool haha 👍👍
Gotta be honest, I feel like the fact that the protagonist and almost all of his named allies in the first movie being human kind of belies that point. If humans were all bastards they wouldn't be helping the Na'vi, if anything it more fits the white saviour trope which is problematic in its own right.
Yeah they're trying to do the colonizer allegory thing, but from my understanding in this universe humanity needs the resources or they die. You can't do the greedy exploited thing if they need the thing they are exploiting to survive.
@@marcthomas5949 In the second one 'The Resource' has changed. Nobody mentions Unobtainium once, now they're killing Space Whales to harvest their brain-goo that stops human aging.
@@SimuLord no amount of feel good resistance stories are going to save them from being wiped out by the diseases the Spaniards brought. Sure, they might drive them off the island and eventually convince Spain it's not worth the effort, but without the herd immunity they're *Fucked*
The visuals and the base worldbuilding, that's why. Problem is Jammy Camembert Cheese built a lame story and outright toxic message from that foundation. Nobody can remember a thing from it because it had nothing worth telling, just pretty scenery and unusually geeky documents on every plant, animal and evil hooman vehicle roaming Pandora.
@@TheSpearkan there was something under a big tree and the naughty humans wanted to blow it up. That's all I can remember from the first one. Still have the watch the bluray I bought, if only for Sigourney Weaver.
@@zensoredparagonbytes3985 it was the largest deposit of unobtainium they had ever recorded. So it was the same old story of "let's move these people so we can get at it".
I've also never actually had someone try to talk to me about the second Avatar movie, nor have I seen it myself. You're right, it is weird it made all the money.
the game immediately lost it on me when i saw in the trailer that some primitive bow & arrow can function as anti-material weaponry against a space-faring civilization's armored vehicles
Arrows have a higher momentum than bullets, and that's for normal human arrows. Momentum is a reasonable predictor for penetration. It seems fine, basically? We did switch from arrows to bullets historically, but the details are surprisingly complicated: volly fire robs arrows of most of their momentum, training time for a longbow is essentially an entire lifetime to get the arm strength compared to two weeks for a gun, and so on.
@@SimonBuchanNz Momentum isn't exactly what dictates penetration, cross-section, material properties and velocity do. Arrows kinda suck at penetrating harder materials, they only work on softer ones like...Say...Meat? Even a primitive musket is significantly more powerful than the most powerful longbow ever used.
Yahtzee, first of all, want to say- I'm a long time fan. Going on 15 years. I'm so happy for you all for stepping out and getting the hell away from Escapist and building your own outlet. With that said, as much as I love seeing you take potshots at Ubisoft and hearing your thoughts on Atlus, Croteam, etc., (and assuming it's not already in the works), what I really look forward to are your thoughts on some of the stranger, or off the beaten path IPs and titles. Would love to hear your take on games like Jusant, Frog Detective, Teardown, or even the new Detective Pikachu. With all of that said, I'm so thrilled to see you all striking out on your own. The content has been incredible thus far, and I know a certain amount of recognition in reviewed titles is necessary to keep the lights on and the views up. You're one of the best in the business, and you keep excellent company. I look forward to whatever comes next, always. Much love to the Second Wind crew.
Because Avatar is mostly loved by people abroad. Like I stayed in China and had many friends in Japan and all of them were obsessing and going to see the movie. Meanwhile they were really surprised when I told them most Americans really don't care about Avatar
I actually enjoyed the Avatar game that released back when the original movie came out. 2 separate ones, actually, since the one i had on the 360 (3rd person shooter that looked fucking gorgeous, for the time, and let you play as both human and Navi (with surprisingly different gameplay since the Navi campaign was 90% melee instead of shooting) based on an early choice in the campaign where *_you could actually side with the humans killing their way through the ecosystem_* though sadly you'd be working with the Navi by the end) was very different from the DS (top down adventure as a navi child getting the Chosen One treatment to go fight off the human invaders) they were both better quality than I'd expect from a licensed game, not masterpieces by any means but decent. Main gameplay loop of the shooter was get dropped into massive, beautiful map of an area on Pandora, told to go kill someone or find something specific, rinse and repeat. Half the fun was all the bosses were characters in the opposing campaign.
Actually iirc they gave you another choice late in the campaign on whether you keep on working for your side or switch to the side you didn't pick last minute. At least in the Human campaign. I also remember it being rough because you go from tearing through Na'vi with your superior weapons, to having to fight human soldiers armed with those same weapons. The switch up gave a bit of whiplash lol.
It's looks like we've got the yearly Ubisoft sandbox for the Bland 5, so that should hopefully bring back a sense of normalcy after this year's upheaval.
You know how avatar could get my attention? Switch focus to a tribe that suffered exile and repeated attempts at genocide for their crimes of discovering fire and experimenting with metal. Because, let's be honest with ourselves, the rest of the Navi are exactly the sort of technophobic pricks who would pull that kind of nonsense. And then the fire tribe starts making deals with the humans for better tech in exchange for local intel. Seriously, there has got to be somewhere on this planet that isn't pristine forests or whatever that the humans could set up shop without offending anyone.
Nope. The planet is perfect, the navi are peftect, and you're every kidn of ist and phobe possible if you think otherwise and I spit in your general direction.
The next movie is supposed to show the deserts of Pandora and its native Na'vi tribes which we've been told won't be so cooperative with Jake's rebellion.
@@theviniso Makes sense. A place where it is harder to access nature's internet and where food is not plenty might actually produce Navi who are more human than even James Camoeron likes to admit. Which is why the desert tribes will absolutely join Jake at the end.
@@theviniso Yep, after the Air tribe and the Water tribe, we are now getting the Earth tribe. I wonder what the Fire tribe will look like in the 4th movie. Or is humanity the fire tribe ? Is the final movie going to oppose to Mark Hamill ? No way they would make something that good.
"Remember when games didn't need x-ray specs to let you know what was important because you could just tell?" Man that's hitting close to home right now. I just started playing through the Demon's Souls remake a few days ago, and while it's certainly a pretty-looking game, it's so hard to tell what I'm looking at sometimes because of all the detail and crazy modern-Western-games-studio-lighting-effects and whatnot. Prime example is trying to pick up your bloodstain after you died. I've almost lost my souls on multiple occasions because I couldn't tell which faint glow against the terrain was my bloodstain versus all the other faint glows of lighting effects and other people's bloodstains while I'm being chased by a skeleton that's faster than me and will take me out in 1 swing of his sword.
Yeah what happened to prioritizing the information aspect of the visual design? There has to be a balance between photorealism and playability. At least make pickable objects glow slightly or something. Personally, I would prefer if the Arkham style X-ray vision mode died out. It's been overdone, it yanks you away from the much advertised beautiful graphics every 30 seconds, and it really only serves to remove the suspense from stealth sections.
Seeing callisto protocol be 80% of is nuts. I want to play it one day but even £20 seem too much. Also YES, i dont think iv ever met an avatar fan im convinced at this point its a tax thing
@@VeritabIlIti I was about to be disparaging, but as someone who loves Fallout 4 it’d be a bit hypocritical of me to dog on someone for liking Avatar. I guess I can see at least some of the appeal, even if I can’t share in the enjoyment.
They should've done what Alien vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar did: had separate campaigns for the different races that're fighting against each other. And also make it a level by level shooter rather than a Jiminy Cockthroat game
My guess on what would be better is “exploration game or game where you have to use the beautiful environment and fauna to get places and then maybe murder some asshole colonists with them,” feels like it would fit the fantasy of being blue cat people who are one with nature a bit better.
I don't know how I've never seen avatar in that light, but they live in an idyllic paradise, have no natural predators and their whole ecosystem is literally managed by a hivemind that makes their houses literally grow from trees Maybe it's because these movies are renowned for being impossible to think about
0:46 I mean, yeah? Minus the whole sewer people exaggeration, Avatar appeals to, and I mean it in the most neutral way possible, a casual audience. The type of person that will go to the movies, go "wow that's neat", and move on with their lives as opposed to writing ten billion shipfics of Jake/Neytiri or something. The clearest example of a silent majority that comes to my mind.
The crafting phallis of the Jiminy cocktail throat seems particularly egregious here because isn't the whole message of Avatar "don't strip mine nature?" Especially making you play as a Navi seems to be blind to the point of making Stevie Wonder blush
Avatar is like the Emperor's New Clothes in that it's bad, but for some reason the overall perception is that it's good and therefore it makes billions.
The beginning reminded me of a great moment from a let's play channel called Friends Without Benefits where one of them asked the other "Have you seen Avatar?" who then promptly went on a 3 minute tirade about how everyone saw Avatar, but noone remembers it really, and how it make a bajillion dollars but has had no impact on anything, only for the guy who originally asked him to say "I mean, The Last Airbender...". It feels like everyone knows OF Avatar, and associates the word to the film, but that's about the limit of it's impact on the world, is just making Avatar, the Airbender one, slightly more annoying to ask about because you need to clarify it every time.
I don't understand how humans could master interstellar travel and establish oppresive colonies on foreign planets, but haven't figured out how to make glass that could withstand being hit by an arrow.
The arrows are as big as a person, probably weigh something like 5kg, and are fired by a nearly 4m bow with who knows what draw weight. The relative kinetic energy between bullets and arrows night favor bullets dramatically, but KE doesn't really determine penetration, that's more determined by momentum, which is much more favorable to the heavier object, with even normal human hunting arrows having twice the momentum of a bullet. While it's not quite the same issue, consider the example that bullet proof vests are often fairly useless against knives. Also keep in mind that, as dumb as it is, they have in other places used the handwave that these aren't the military, they're private security for a penny pinching corporation and everything is lowest bidder.
@@moonjelly5 having not seen it... shrug? Anyway I'd just be inventing reasons for decisions made by characters on Earth we don't even know the names of, most likely.
0:35 it’s incredibly bizarre. The sequel was one of the most successful of all time but I saw literally no one talk about it online, and I just assumed it failed until I googled and saw otherwise. How can something be so successful and literally no one mentions it?
It's such a missed opportunity that they didn't work more on stealth combat, the Far Cry games had fun stealth gameplay and it would make so much sense in this scenario. But no, all the combat gameplay I have seen of this consists of you being able to take out mechs with a bow and arrow and shoot down gunships with a few shots from an assault rifle.
Damn dude that is one hell of a long-haul callback! What was even the name of that God of War rip-off? It was so half-assed Yahtz didn't even play anything more than the demo for that review, if I remember right
@@AnotherCraig Good (eh) ol' Heavenly Sword, and yep. Yahtz didn't play the full game, and as somebody who *did* play a pretty good chunk of it when I was younger, I don't fucking blame the man xD
The best comparison to the Avatar franchise is a tech demo game ala Wii Sports. Sure lots of people will have watched/ played it, but would anyone say its memorable beyond the broad strokes? Probably not.
I did watch the last Avatar movie and basically I can say the seats were filled by the following: -families looking to entertain their kids for a couple of hours -people who cling to every pop culture media they are advertised to -weird high schoolers with nothing better to do Only reason I was there was my dad and I needed to kill time and nothing else.
4th category - people who are interested in the latest VFX and want to see it on the biggest screen possible - I saw them talking about it on corridor crew channel and thought why not, should be interesting
-weird offspring-father duos with nothing better to do Added that for ya, hehe J/k though, spendin' time with fam is good stuff heh Can watch the most "whatever" stuff with the kids. Avatar ain't too bad, tolerable entertainment (blue dudes look super-duper weird, aesthetically, to me anyway lol)
@@mukkah lol true, spending Christmas with my dad is sort of that. Though I’m actually an adult just trying to make sure to spend time with my dad and make sure he is well. It wasn’t bad, but I felt like I got the same impression from the first movie. Honestly, I ended up booting up Subnautica again after the movie and having fun with that instead.
I'm enjoying the game a lot but I also love the worldbuilding of Pandora. I've been flying around on my ikran for hours, just exploring, vibing, and doing side quests and collectibles. The fan community on the internet also likes it. And yes, they (we? We) exist 😅
I asked my girlfriend about this movie when I saw the game pop for pre-order. I asked her: “So what did you think of this movie? It really wasn’t anything spectacular and honestly I thought it was overrated.” My girlfriend replied, “Well, it was a very pretty movie…but yeah.”
The movie was lovely in the theater when I watched it, but I quite literally forgot about it afterwards. Odd, that. Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas everyone!
I almost would call the Avatar IP a sleeper hit, but it’s more like a blackout hit. It’s super successful and but nobody remembers why or how. It’s just a gap in memory.
I'm in my mid 30s, I remember when Avatar came out and everyone said it was good but nobody claimed to be a fan. It's such a weird property, it's apparently super popular but I don't know anyone who cares about it. Repeat the same thing with the 2nd film And now it seems like the game will follow the trend
Honestly the one thing I wish this game had that personally would really enjoy is an option for stereoscopic 3D output. Because I think that's one of the big things for the avatar movies. They are made to be seen in 3D and I feel like having this new game also have a 3D mode would have been pretty cool. Especially since I'm currently looking at getting a Sony PlayStation 3D display to view a bunch of 3D content.
I'm suddenly picturing a game where you play as an Ewok trying to survive Imperial occupation and all of the local megafauna. Remember also that Ewoks eat people.
It's the last Fully Ramblomatic of the year! If you're enjoying Second Wind consider supporting us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Yahtzee's "list" of games will be the first episode of the new year!
Makes me curious if he's gonna have to roll in all the games reviewed on ZP because strictly sticking to FullRam would make a very tiny list this time around.
It will be any game he's reviewed in 2023.@@gameman250
@@SecondWindGroup So business as usual then. Good to know.
Are we going with "Windbags" ? I like that name.
@@SocksAndPuppets Given how long Yahtzee's been on the Internet, I wouldn't say no to a name like that
How good the Navi have it by comparison to humans makes me think of the Star Trek quote;
"It's easy to be a saint in paradise."
On of Sisko's greatest quotes and part of the reason I loved DS:9 so much.
That's more or less avatar 2
@@scarocci7333says a person who has clearly never gone camping. 🙄
@@scarocci7333 yeah, no. To say nature hates us would be to ascribe far too much feeling to it. Nature is coldly apathetic to us. It doesn't care if we live or die. We are just easily broken toys for it to dispassionately shatter and destroy.
@@scarocci7333 nah mate, sickness, parasites, starvation, pain and natural disasters existed long before humans did. If anything, we made our own paradise, given that starvation and getting eaten are pretty rare occurences in 1st world countries.
As someone who lives in the tropics and has to check his shoes and bed sheets for spiders, scorpions and other creepy crawlies before use, I can confidently say that the vision of nature presented in Avatar could only exist in the mind of a city dwelling millionaire who's closest interactions with the wild is paying a few grand a couple of times a year to go on an all-inclusive guided safari tour and resort.
In other words, the mind of James Cameron.
@@ChrisMattern-oh6wx Well, he is a deep-sea diver, which is involves encasing yourself in the most impenetrable bubble possible in order to keep nature away as you explore it, so...
@@DavidRichardson153 I mean, it's not like he has a choice.
He can make good sea horror movies but not jungle.
So James Cameron.
I'm glad Yahtz brought up how weirdly obliging nature is on Pandora.
You just know that if we had magical nerve ponytails that could connect to the minds of other living things there would be an entire ecosystem of horrible worms and other crawling things looking to infect our brains through it.
I mean most large life on earth has poisonous brain chemistry (low enough to fuction high enough to kill any parasite trying to subvert the brain) to prevent that sort of thing which is terrifying to think about when you remember that evolution takes a long time to adapt
Imagine getting brain aids and then start talking about kingdom hearts being a game you can take seriously
Avatar 3: Rise of the Brown Crawlers
It’s called social media! ZIIIING!!!
System Shock 2: The Many have called, and want you to join them
Yep, Avatar is a weird one. I can't think of another property where the amount of money it makes compared to it's pop culture presence is so mismatched.
Probably because it's a very "in-the-moment" cultural experience. James Cameron's framing and VFX seem designed to watch on the biggest screen possible, so anything at home feels pedestrian compared to his other movies.
I remember when it first was in theaters and how people raved about it. I never had the slightest desire to see it, but part of that was the 3D hype and 3D movies make me feel sick. I also already wear glasses and really don't need to fuck around with a second pair.
Another way I've heard it referenced is "you know, that movie everyone watched but no one can quote a single line from?".
I waited an watched on a streaming network and glad I did. The movie was so god awful, boring and derivative that I just checked put 1/4 the way through.
Right? When I do think of Avatar... I think of The Last Airbender series.
The only thing I remember about this franchise is how they got the composer to spend months to make alien music nobody has heard before. Then throw all it away because it was too weird. Feels like a franchise with alot of world building that wasn't showcased because they want to play it safe. So safe I can't remember a single thing.
Avatar is so strange, it's got a franchise, merch out the butt and a fricking theme park but I ask anyone if they like it and the most I'll hear is "well, I watched the films."
I found a let's player recently (initially via a different game) who's been playing this and was already a huge Avatar fan. Dude was absolutely loving being able to explore Pandora, so good for him.
I assume that Avatar and Pandora pushes some button in normal people's heads that videogames normally push for gamers. All the excitement just courses around us without touching us, due to the way algorithms and recommendations on the internet work.
I agree, I don't care about the films, but the theme park is impressive, and I rank the Avatar Flight of Passage as the best theme park ride I have experienced. Since 2018 I have had annual passes at WDW, DL, Universal Orlando, and Universal Hollywood, and Dollywood, so I have plenty to compare to.
@@nonyabidness8676 I have heard that it's one of those things that really, really, REALLY captured the imagination of certain groups of people, and I suspect they're the sort of people who would enjoy xenofiction if they knew it existed.
I do remember people going genuinely nuts over the first one. It's just weird when they stay dormant for over a decade and then come out claiming the film was some cultural touchstone.
I saw it, of course. Thought it was pretty meh. It was more visually and technically interesting than anything. I'd almost compare it more to a fireworks display than a film. I'm not going to tell you not to enjoy it and I won't claim it isn't impressive, but I'm going to raise an eyebrow when you tell me the nuanced story and timeless message changed your life.
The thing I would actually like to see James Cameron make is a fake "Planet Earth" style nature documentary set on Pandora. It would show off the detailed world building Cameron made and I kinda think he would actually like making it.
Considering Cameron wrote the blue cat version of the Simarillian I think that could be cool
@@justwolf3937 He could even get Sigourney Weaver to narrate it (she narrated the US version of Planet Earth).
@@justwolf3937wait wath? Any chance for name this is bound to be hilarius 😂
@@Akabans999 I made it up, he might have but I don't watch bad movies so idk much about this series
Honestly it'd probably be more entertaining than the two movies he's already made (that are basically just The Same Movie Again).
Speaking as one of the legions of sewer people who did enjoy James Cameron's Avatar I can say with confidence that there's already a game that captures everything good about the film, adapts it into a fun gameplay loop and then grafts a bunch of other good stuff on it as well. It's called Subnautica.
Subnautica WOO!
so glad i played the first one before trying out the second though
Oh yeah, true. Not that the second is BAD but it's just not the same. @@laughingstock7638
You aren't wrong.
I say this as someone who liked Avatar and loved Subnautica
@@schrodingerscat3741 the whole appeal of Avatar imo is "hey look at this gorgeous fantasy planet full of cool creatures, imagine going there"
Subnautica is that but with cooler creatures and a really good story to boot
Every Wednesday the tornado siren goes off as part of a test and it instantly reminds me to watch the new episode
life lemons n lemonade, eh bro? ^^
Every week? That seems a bit excessive. Does the testers ex live next to the sirens, or something?
For game publishers, a tornado siren could be considered a fitting signal of Yahtzee making a new video.
classical conditioning but instead of a bell and food, it's a tornado siren and a yahtzee video
Wednesday is just a good day for videos, skill up does his on Wednesday too
We're now officially at the point where I expect the FR themetune correctly, and not the ZP themetune.
Likewise. Always ready to headbang to the Mick Gordon-esque theme here
Likewise. And not only do i start to expect it correctly.... is weirdly prefer it to the old one, did from the very episode after the split.
@@SimuLord I love that.
I like the new one. The old one always scared the shit out of me at the end
*moshes in office chair. Alone.
I've always said, my only metric for whether or not graphics in a game are good is whether or not I can tell at a glance what is and is not a thing. Used to be the graphics were so low-quality that they couldn't highlight the important stuff, but now apparently it's that they're so HIGH-quality that they can't highlight the important stuff. We are reaching the singularity of too-good graphics, and faster than I thought we would.
Art design and level design are really important. For all its other problems, The Last Of Us 2 gets this right. Those environments are incredibly detailed but things are easy to find even when you remove HUD elements.
As much as ppl hate on last of us 2, I can’t imagine a game looking much better than that. It looks like a movie. While still avoiding uncanny valley.
Don’t know where else there is to go.
This one definitely one of yahtzees better reviews. His renaming the name running gag was spot on.
@@マリー-v4p More range, I would think. Games like that reduce the scope of the graphics they need to make by doing the whole post-apocalyptic thing.
Right? The only thing the graphics NEED to do, at least in most cases, is (a) give the player visual cues to help with gameplay and navigation and (b) look like at least a rough approximation of the thing they represent. It's pleasant, even quite beautiful at times, when they go beyond that, but I play games for the engagement and interactivity, not because I want to stare at pretty pictures.
If the only thing someone cares about is graphical fidelity they can watch a damn movie. I'll just be over here playing Sea of Stars or Hades, neither of which is a graphical powerhouse, both of which were clearly made to be fun and interesting.
Avatar reminds me of a book series called "The Damned Trilogy." In this series it turns out every advanced sapient species evolves on a tectonically dead Pangea planet. So almost every species evolves to be non-violent. Some vomit and pass out just from hearing about violence. There is a galactic war going between to major factions. One is mind control slugs controlling and engineering other sapient species. The other is a collocation of free sapient species called the Weave, I think. The Weave only has one species capable of fighting and even that takes a lot of training. Both sides are always on the look out for more allies. The Weave finds the Sol system and their minds are blown.
Long story short humans are the only sapient species that is if not only okay with violence, they are adapt at it, and even they thrive in it. Humanity was on its way to being peaceful. However, the initial results of a few peaceful humans entering combat were so drastic that the Weave saw no choice but, to get humanity involved. Like two teenage homeless kids, a fisherman, and a pair of college students were able to break through the front lines of a stalemate that lasted decades.
The Damned is the exact bullseye of a guilty pleasure: the whole thing is such an unrepentant HFY ("Humanity, Fuck Yeah!") I can't take any of it seriously, but the writing is actually pretty good and finds enough fresh things to do with the concept that I can't just toss it into the Sturgeon memory hole.
@@SimonBuchanNz I don't come across a lot of published HFY. So it was really refreshing to read a series with Doom music starts playing when a human enters the room. Usually the humans are weaker.
@@XShrike0 honestly I find it hard to find the opposite: YFH. The most prominent (unless you count Avatar, I guess 😅) I can think of is Titan AE: a movie where humanity is mostly wiped out, and the climatic ending is we find a planet to live on. (I'm simplifying, of course) Even then, the plot is kicked off by a prophecy about humans of all things.
Even in settings where pretty much every other species is humanity but better (like Star Trek), humans are still "special" and the "main characters"
@@SimonBuchanNz WAS there a prophecy? I thought the Dredge wiped out Earth because Humanity had the *potential* to destroy them. Someday.
@@johannesseyfried7933 I forget how it was worded, but it's effectively the "cause the prediction by attempting to avert it" trope which is generally a prophecy, probably why i remember it that way
Yahtzee makes a good point. For a franchise who's first film grossed over 2.9 billion dollars, you don't really see that many people actually care about it. I know I don't. And Yahtzee's rant about how demonized rhe humans are for not being peaceful and nature loving like the Na'vi are, when nature actively helps them instead of trying to kill them like Earth nature, is so accurate. Same goes for better graphics making it harder to find what you're supposed to do.
That is a good point.
There are reasons for that, and one is that there were some people who watched the first Avatar movie and contemplated suicide so they could wake up as Na'vi. And wrote whole Tumblrs and Livejournals about it. Lots of them.
It's quite funny that this game is less fun than the movie tie in game released nearly 15 years ago.
Seriously, the first Avatar game is janky as hell but still fun, it even let you play two seperate stories as human and Navi.
@@tortoiseoflegends4466 Between janky as hell but fun and technically sound but boring, I think the latter better captures the spirit of the Avatar movies, honestly.
@@fwg1994 Sure, but I'd prefer the first.
The very fact that this is a major game release that I've seen advertised all over the place and yet doesn’t even have it's own dedicated TV Tropes page even after it's release is pretty emblematic of Avatar's pop culture impact despite it's huge success financially.
I remember first watching Cameron's Avatar and waiting for the big reveal that the whole ecosystem was genetically engineered by a precursor race and that the massive unobtainium deposit was their ship or something, what with the whole "plug and play brain stem with internet trees" thing.
But no, it was just noble savages all the way down.
I liked how Yahtzee pointed out the hypocrisy of believing those who have had everything in nature be catered to them are superior to those that had to fight in an environment that was actively hostile for 1000s of years.
Maybe a good spin-off story would be exploring the inherited mindset of humanity and the heroes are those who struggle against it rather than run away to a paradise like some of the main characters did in the Avatar movies.
That is funny, turns out its easy to love nature when nearly every animal in your environment can be made into a obedient Pokemon if you plug your hair into it.
I think that's kind of the point of the films though. Nature was catered to the Na'vi so humanity shouldn't have even bothered trying to go and conquer a place that was so blatantly not theirs
@eoinsmith15 I agree. The movie was " Dances with Wolves" in space. That's fine, and I don't expect anything subversive from James Cameron. I just feel like the whole "noble savage," "civilization is corrupt," and "humans are monsters" tropes are dull, nihilistic, and pure escapism. I want to see a story about people struggling for a better world. For all its cringe and earnestness, I think Final Fantasy 7 has better environmentalist, anti corporate, and anti colonial messages than Avatar.
I agree that there's a lot to explore with more grey areas but no, none of the humans who came to the planet are there because there is a need based on survival for them to be there. They were shipped there at massive expense by giant corporations trying to make even more giant piles of money. This isn't a situation of "oh we have to steal because we would starve otherwise", it's "wow that looks like mighty fine jewelry, mind if I take it? oh you mind, well then if you resist I guess I have good cause to kill and displace you".
The problem with your logic is that if past difficulty in survival serves as justification for future brutality, then we would have to throw out basically all moral considerations ever, so let's not :)
I still think a lot could be done with more morally questionable blue people though. Maybe a clan of them that immediately reacted violently to first human contact instead of first shaky but positive relations that then broke down rapidly as in the first movie. That would serve as an interesting jumping off point to discuss what response is actually the right one to pending colonialism.
@@eoinsmith15 But it wasn't? The point of the films wasn't "humanity overestimated their strength and took on a planet they shouldn't have," like you're seemingly implying. It was "the Na'vi are morally superior to humanity because they are one with nature, therefore they win." At least in the first movie (I haven't seen the second), the humans would have won then and there had they not had a traitor, who only turned on them because of the Na'vi's "moral superiority". Humanity didn't lose because it was an inherently unwinnable fight. They lost because the plot defined them as the bad guys.
Seconding that "It's apparently the most famous movie ever but I've never actually met anyone who is a fan or it or almost anyone who's actually watched it" feeling. The fanbase for it has to have an odd venn diagram that doesn't cross with anything in the world I care about.
3:57 This actually reminds me a lot of how I used to play MechWarrior 2 back in the '90s. I *always* kept the X-Ray mode on because it highlighted how damaged enemy Mechs' body parts were and where the cockpit was to snipe for an easy kill. (Yes, you could see how damaged the individual parts were on the little mini-model of a specific target on the corner of the screen, but why would I ever use that when I can see *every* Mech's current status, all the time, right where my crosshair was?)
It was so useful that I actually forgot that the game had actual textures until I started watching Let's Plays of the game over a decade later where people didn't use it. And this was an early 3D game from the '90s, where unnecessarily gratuitous foliage or other environmental details in video games were exceedingly rare!
*Image enhancement engaged*
That's why I always hated that Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries didn't have that function. It always made it so much easier to see what was going on, especially in nighttime missions. But its "Clan tech only" so the more Inner Sphere focused Mercenaries just had a low light/infrared mode instead. But all that did was add an orange filter to the screen, which really just made it harder to see anything.
They even brought the color coded wireframe mode back in Heavy Gear, which was mostly the same codebase as MW Mercenaries.
Man those were the good days. Right between 2d and 3d when your graphics card changed the way the whole game played.
To be fair, calling what Mechwarrior 2 had "textures" is being very generous. They were somewhere between roughly 8x8 to 16x16 pixel textures for the entire mech.
And that's what I do today in MW5. There's so much "shtuff" on the screen it can be difficult to even see the enemy to aim at. I'm in thermals mode half the time at least.
And now I'm having fond memories of my time playing the Batman: Arkham Radioactive Skeleton Fever Dream trilogy.
I love how catty (excuse the pun) Yahtzee is towards the Na'vi, it makes me wish he actually did see the films just so he realizes how spot on he was
To be fair, maybe he did see them, but has completely forgotten about them.
I remember being thoroughly entertained by the spectacle of both movies, but if you asked me to tell the story, I'd be hard pressed to tell anything definitive.
@@ivanrzhanoy9389 Never saw the 2nd but the first one is just the white savior trope but sci-fi
@@Lucarioguild7 Dances With Wolves only with a boring, monotonous and charisma-free lead actor.
... wait that's exactly Dances With Wolves.
The second one is that but with evil whalers. Because of course the first thing humans would do after the setback of the first movie is not launch a full scale invasion, not drop asteroids on the Na'vi, not switch tactics to more diplomatic and insidious means but hunt sea life. Because apparently humanity in this universe are all Captain Planet villains.
@@zephyr8072 my favourite part about the whaling is it's for literal space whale brain juice for fucking ANTiI AGING CREAM.
Not even something to help Avatars connect with their human pilots or even the stupid Unobtanium which solved the energy crisis on Earth. Anti. Aging. Cream.
I love Avatar a lil more than ironically, but that was so stupid I burst out laughing in the theatre
@@GlitteryGecko I'm sure this was meant to be an allegory for real life poaching for medicinal cures and all that.
Of course it makes no sense in universe for the humans to waste valuable resources on such a thing, especially when they imply that Earth needs to be evacuated soon.
If anything the allegory would've been apt had they depicted Na'vi doing the whaling in order to sell the brain juice to the humans. But that would require a more nuanced take on these people other than a weird monoculture of one-with-nature hippies.
Seeing these comments reminds me of that test you're meant to try where you get people to name a character from Star Wars, then Marvel, then Avatar. I have a friend who used to share a flat with me who couldn't name a single character in Star Wars, not even the obvious ones like Princess Leia or Anakin Skywalker, but could name the lead Human character in Avatar (Who even I don't remember the name of). I was AMAZED when this happened. I couldn't believe it when I tried it.
To be fair, they must say “Jake Sully” hundreds of times throughout the second movie. Like they constantly blurt out his name in particular if I remember right. I couldn’t name a single other character though.
I would’ve loved to play as the humans. Yeah I’d be missing the point of the game, but I want a mech suit!
There was a previous Avatar game that had a human and a Navi campaigns .. that was actually quite interesting.
It would make an interesting RTS
@@AscendantStoic that was a great game. A bit short, but otherwise great fun.
Imagine playing something like an Armored Core character in Pandora. I love nature documentaries, but the Avatar movie never looked like something other than fancy cartoon. The characters bored me and I only enjoyed the evil mech.
A game where you build a factory on another planet while killing the natives? It's called factorio. Riftbreaker also fits, if you want some additional angst from the protagonist about exploitation of the innocent nature.
I remember seeing the first avatar when it came out, I remember the theater being packed and all, but me and my uncle saw it and we kinda forgot about it in like an hour. Now i remember it as the first 3D movie I saw.
Honestly I just think back to Yahtzee's rant on the old channel about the "rise of the boomer shooter," and how this rising desire for clarity and simplicity is probably a direct response to games like this, where you can get lost amongst the debris of colorful grassblades and flowers, and there's so much for you to do, and then after about an hour frolicking through the woods get sick of it because the game hasn't given an honest to goodness fun challenge since you started.
Avatar just reminds people of the days they could go see a special effects blockbuster in a theatre and then not think about it at all until maybe a sequel came out.
It was 2016 when Yahtzee's off mention of Avatar during The Surge review that many people collectively thought about it for the first time in years.
I was very excited when I saw this because much like the movie, I've seen *literally nobody else* talk about or even mention this game, which I suppose is quite fitting for Avatar
The first movie was interesting because of Cameron and 3d movies being exciting and new. The second one I am convinced was only seen by so many because of the popularity of the first, people went to see it because they thought everyone was going to see it. A self driving hype train.
The Na'vi just can't carry a story they too morally good they have no fault or real conflict between each other. Also they just make the human stupidity evil.
Been seeing ads for it and rolling my eyes at them.
I haven't seen a single ad for it
I’ve seen a ton of ads for it but it just slides right past me
The Na'vi having the effective lifehack of a one with nature easy mode is a good point that I think a lot of people missed in the movies.
Na'vi. "I plugged my thing into its thing and now it's my loyal steed until I choose to release it. This took all of 5 seconds. I also literally have mother nature on speed dial and she regularly gives me clear unambiguous signals as to what's happening."
Human. "We selectively breed out aggression and push desirable traits to the surface. This process is a constant effort that outstrips our own lifespans. Life is a constant unknowable vicious struggle with little to no warning about what is happening on the macro level unless we use technology."
Movie: They are the same and humans are terrible.
@@SageWon-1aussie Aw dang, I see how you read it. I meant it as a parallel to how the Na'vi tame their animals. They get a 5 second brain meld and we have to go though the long and convoluted process of domestication.
@@SageWon-1aussiehe meant domestication
"Those were my chips!" oh I felt the venom there 😂
They're greedy little bastards no matter where they go. The boardwalk on the shore they will straight chase you down if you got fries.
Never trust a seagull
I love the running joke about Yahtzee getting his revenge on the seagulls that keep stealing his chips.
As a fellow British person, I can totally relate. Seagulls can be vicious little banditos if you're open-carrying something tasty.
Time to go all Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse on the beaked bastard
I think the reason Avatar is so popular rests solely on the environment of Pandora and how cool it is. I remember watching the first film and LOVING it only to rewatch it later and be like...hmm...this seems more preachy than I remember it being. Then I realized that the first time I watched it I was just so enamored with Pandora itself that the story really didn't matter that much. I mean, who wouldn't give their left nut to live in a world like Pandora and be able to interact with it as the Na'vi do?
So how old were you when you saw it the first time? It's kinda hard to ignore the preacy side of it al as an adult.
@@Chris.Pontius I was mid 20s I think? The 3D spectacle combined with how much I love CGI and animation made it really appealing to me. I mean, I definitely picked up on some of the messaging the first time I watched it, but I was so caught up in the spectacle that it didn't matter to me until I watched it again years later. Not to mention my dad told me it was basically Dances with Wolves in space and I couldn't get that outta my head. 🤣
@SirSnorklebum Haha, alright, there goes my theory they are mostly profiting/apealing to kids with this franchise.
@@Chris.Pontius I have no doubt that's part of it, but Avatar was a HUGE phenomenon when it came out. People were getting depression over Pandora not being a real place. I think it just happens that like me, after the novelty of it wore off, people just weren't into getting preached at.
Maybe because I was enjoying a white chocolate Digestive with a cup of tea or because Yahtzee and I have a shared annoyance for Avatar... but this feels like one of the best videos he has done. Not only the jokes (seagull revenge will stay with me forever), but it feels like there are a lot of amazing cuts / expressions / actions and variety between each of the stills.
I love how the Na'Vi are represented by those blue cats, very amusing aesthetic choice.
With franchises this big you have to be VERY careful not to look anything like "their intellectual property". So you might as well just go all the way out on a pisser.
It took a while to really sink in for me, but shortly after coming down from the laughter at that "way behind on my have some actual fucking fun quota" line I realised I would have NEVER heard that line in that form with that level of intensity on the Escapist. Keep up the great work, y'all
I have seen both films but honestly, they fall through the mind like they're greased. The box art also makes me think of the Dragonriders (how to tame your dragon) instead, and I'm humming that trilogy's theme song.
Lol I love that expresson ' fall through the mind like they're greased' . The films really do send me to sleep!
I'll leave you to imagine the "splorch" they make too :P
@@philippak7726 I dont remember that in Dragonriders.....lol
So glad Yahtz can keep using terminology he invented. Jiminy Cockthroat is such a classic.
i love how Second Wind is emphatically NOT the last show, but the turnaround was hilarious, don't think we don't see the little details
Ah, it's always great when Yahtzee finds an anti-inudstrial blue humanoid animal to rant about. Happy holidays and thanks again, lads!
I used to work in a cinema and I can confirm that buying up empty seats to pad ticket numbers happens all the time. That late night show where you thought you were the only one in there? All those remaining seats were bought by the studio. You can't trust box office "receipts" at all!
This sounds like a great news story! Incredible that the studios have kept this under wraps with how easy it would be to prove, especially given it happens all the time!
@@SimonBuchanNz It would happen at both the top and bottom selling films. The bottom ones would be trying to reach a certain number for quotas. I don't know exactly how it worked but they had to sell a certain number of tickets to not fuck the DVD release. And the top films would be trying to boost their numbers for the acclaim. Like, a big super hero film buying up a couple hundred seats so it could hang on to the number one spot for another week or claim it "sold out".
I’ve got to say that I like the Fully Ramblomatic music a lot better than the old Zero Punctuation one!
I think I'm starting to get used to the change! :D
Hard disagree, just doesn't feel the same
@@wtfdddf it is not supposed to be the same. The music at least.
how much better would this be if all the na'vi kids were 100% totally into human culture and were "Rescued" by their birth tribe and there was a huge clash and you had a story where you could go with the humans back to earth because the corpo dude actually saw himself like a father figure but it required you to betray your tribe - it would be the "Evil" (selfish) ending, but how much more interesting of a story would that be
I think thats antithetical to what the entire franchise stands for. Which is to be a shittier dances with wolves. Loving the settlers who murdered everyone you know and destroyed your planet isnt even a clever ending, its just plain stupid
@@garfoonga1 Its not like there were not IRL historical examples of locals siding with the invaders for various reasons, hell, the entire conquest of the Aztec empire is series of double crossings, backstabs and outright betrayals by the different cities and cultures that were paying tribute to the Aztec, in hope of that in helping the Spanish they will be the next top dogs in the region or just had pure grudge. That played larger role in the fall of the empire than the superior weapons and the small pox epidemic in the early stages in the conflict. Granted Avatar is subtle as a brick to the face, but Stockholm syndrome can be a factor and people tend to have warmer feelings towards the caretakers who actually raised them than to their absent biological relatives, that are out there, somewhere.
@@garfoonga1 i feel like theres _some_ kind of potential there. your na'vi protagonist feeling more-or-less at home on earth, if only because they were raised there. then they start to learn more about their own culture and feel hollow, out of place, this potent sense of grief for the culture they never had a chance to embrace.
maybe they feel anger at their human father figure, they understand now how _fucked up_ it was for him to cut them off from their history and culture, yet they can't bring themself to outright hate him because he _did_ raise them. he's the only family they've ever known, even if they know _now_ that their blood-related family is out there waiting for them.
the ultimate conflict the player has to face would be "do you break free of the colonialist mindset youve been raised with and reconnect with your culture, or do you cave and stay with what's familiar, even if it dashes all hopes of learning more about your roots?"
(i say this without really knowing anything about avatar as a series but like. it sounds like something you could get a decent theme or character arc out of)
I love this idea.
@@garfoonga1
What the franchse stands for is already butchered by the simplicity and hipocracy if its narrative. These movies are already antithetical to their own message.
People clown on Avatar for being forgettable. But in all honesty, a mega franchise being an intentional theater experience that people enjoy and then don't become an obsessive nerd about is kind of refreshing these days.
I also have no intention of seeing the new Avatar and don't remember anything but a Robotjox-esque fight scene at the end of the first one.
So vindicated by Yahtzee calling out the lead-brick-subtlety of these "humans are all thoughtless bastards, nature people are perfect pure little angels" plots- brings me right back to Octopath 2 and rolling my eyes so consistently and continuously throughout Ochette's entire story that you could have hooked my retinas to a turbine and supplied clean renewable power to a third world country
EDIT: i don't actually know ANYTHING about Avatar LOL- if it is more nuanced than that in places then that's cool haha 👍👍
Gotta be honest, I feel like the fact that the protagonist and almost all of his named allies in the first movie being human kind of belies that point. If humans were all bastards they wouldn't be helping the Na'vi, if anything it more fits the white saviour trope which is problematic in its own right.
Yeah they're trying to do the colonizer allegory thing, but from my understanding in this universe humanity needs the resources or they die. You can't do the greedy exploited thing if they need the thing they are exploiting to survive.
I didn't even remember the resource was a necessity for human survival
So did humanity live in the second one?
Ok but Partitio is the most based character ever conceived so that makes up for it.
@@marcthomas5949 In the second one 'The Resource' has changed. Nobody mentions Unobtainium once, now they're killing Space Whales to harvest their brain-goo that stops human aging.
There something about how the blue cat people being portayled in this episode. It both cursed and funny.
I will never understand how Avatar became so popular and is just the series that a famous director is dedicating his life to
@@SimuLord no amount of feel good resistance stories are going to save them from being wiped out by the diseases the Spaniards brought. Sure, they might drive them off the island and eventually convince Spain it's not worth the effort, but without the herd immunity they're *Fucked*
The visuals and the base worldbuilding, that's why.
Problem is Jammy Camembert Cheese built a lame story and outright toxic message from that foundation. Nobody can remember a thing from it because it had nothing worth telling, just pretty scenery and unusually geeky documents on every plant, animal and evil hooman vehicle roaming Pandora.
@@TheSpearkan there was something under a big tree and the naughty humans wanted to blow it up. That's all I can remember from the first one. Still have the watch the bluray I bought, if only for Sigourney Weaver.
@@zensoredparagonbytes3985 it was the largest deposit of unobtainium they had ever recorded. So it was the same old story of "let's move these people so we can get at it".
World building as I haven't seen anything like Avatar, I'm casual as fuck so I love it
I've also never actually had someone try to talk to me about the second Avatar movie, nor have I seen it myself. You're right, it is weird it made all the money.
I love when Yahtzee reviews movie tie-in games because he gets to piss at both the movie AND the game.
the game immediately lost it on me when i saw in the trailer that some primitive bow & arrow can function as anti-material weaponry against a space-faring civilization's armored vehicles
Tbf, I remember it being established in the first movie.
@@teecee1827 and it was bullshit there too!
@@Ediblebomb More of corpos being corpos and picking up the absolute cheapest option that barely holds air in.
Arrows have a higher momentum than bullets, and that's for normal human arrows. Momentum is a reasonable predictor for penetration. It seems fine, basically?
We did switch from arrows to bullets historically, but the details are surprisingly complicated: volly fire robs arrows of most of their momentum, training time for a longbow is essentially an entire lifetime to get the arm strength compared to two weeks for a gun, and so on.
@@SimonBuchanNz
Momentum isn't exactly what dictates penetration, cross-section, material properties and velocity do.
Arrows kinda suck at penetrating harder materials, they only work on softer ones like...Say...Meat?
Even a primitive musket is significantly more powerful than the most powerful longbow ever used.
Yahtzee, first of all, want to say- I'm a long time fan. Going on 15 years. I'm so happy for you all for stepping out and getting the hell away from Escapist and building your own outlet. With that said, as much as I love seeing you take potshots at Ubisoft and hearing your thoughts on Atlus, Croteam, etc., (and assuming it's not already in the works), what I really look forward to are your thoughts on some of the stranger, or off the beaten path IPs and titles. Would love to hear your take on games like Jusant, Frog Detective, Teardown, or even the new Detective Pikachu.
With all of that said, I'm so thrilled to see you all striking out on your own. The content has been incredible thus far, and I know a certain amount of recognition in reviewed titles is necessary to keep the lights on and the views up. You're one of the best in the business, and you keep excellent company. I look forward to whatever comes next, always. Much love to the Second Wind crew.
Because Avatar is mostly loved by people abroad.
Like I stayed in China and had many friends in Japan and all of them were obsessing and going to see the movie.
Meanwhile they were really surprised when I told them most Americans really don't care about Avatar
I actually enjoyed the Avatar game that released back when the original movie came out. 2 separate ones, actually, since the one i had on the 360 (3rd person shooter that looked fucking gorgeous, for the time, and let you play as both human and Navi (with surprisingly different gameplay since the Navi campaign was 90% melee instead of shooting) based on an early choice in the campaign where *_you could actually side with the humans killing their way through the ecosystem_* though sadly you'd be working with the Navi by the end) was very different from the DS (top down adventure as a navi child getting the Chosen One treatment to go fight off the human invaders)
they were both better quality than I'd expect from a licensed game, not masterpieces by any means but decent.
Main gameplay loop of the shooter was get dropped into massive, beautiful map of an area on Pandora, told to go kill someone or find something specific, rinse and repeat. Half the fun was all the bosses were characters in the opposing campaign.
Actually iirc they gave you another choice late in the campaign on whether you keep on working for your side or switch to the side you didn't pick last minute. At least in the Human campaign. I also remember it being rough because you go from tearing through Na'vi with your superior weapons, to having to fight human soldiers armed with those same weapons. The switch up gave a bit of whiplash lol.
I heard it's already on sale, so, that says all I need to know about it
It's looks like we've got the yearly Ubisoft sandbox for the Bland 5, so that should hopefully bring back a sense of normalcy after this year's upheaval.
I like to imagine most of the time making this video was drawing the paint by numbers gag
If you don't want to be spoiled on how the sausage is made, look away now...
...
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Photoshop has a "stained glass" filter that does that to images.
@@SocksAndPuppetsI want to but mobile TH-cam won’t fucking let me.
Underrated comment of the day, for me ^^@@SocksAndPuppets
You know how avatar could get my attention? Switch focus to a tribe that suffered exile and repeated attempts at genocide for their crimes of discovering fire and experimenting with metal. Because, let's be honest with ourselves, the rest of the Navi are exactly the sort of technophobic pricks who would pull that kind of nonsense. And then the fire tribe starts making deals with the humans for better tech in exchange for local intel. Seriously, there has got to be somewhere on this planet that isn't pristine forests or whatever that the humans could set up shop without offending anyone.
Maybe they got a terrible disease that damaged the part of their brain that links to the worldmind or something.
Nope. The planet is perfect, the navi are peftect, and you're every kidn of ist and phobe possible if you think otherwise and I spit in your general direction.
The next movie is supposed to show the deserts of Pandora and its native Na'vi tribes which we've been told won't be so cooperative with Jake's rebellion.
@@theviniso
Makes sense. A place where it is harder to access nature's internet and where food is not plenty might actually produce Navi who are more human than even James Camoeron likes to admit. Which is why the desert tribes will absolutely join Jake at the end.
@@theviniso Yep, after the Air tribe and the Water tribe, we are now getting the Earth tribe. I wonder what the Fire tribe will look like in the 4th movie. Or is humanity the fire tribe ? Is the final movie going to oppose to Mark Hamill ? No way they would make something that good.
Nothing will ever top the ZP theme but damn this new opening and outro go hardddddd
It reminds me of NIN
@@tehbeernerd Oh yeah that's what it reminds me of! Totally picking up their influence on it 😁
I will say this about the Avatar franchise.
It doesn't have an obnoxiously toxic fandom.
That I am aware of (fortunately?).
But only because it doesn't have any kind of fandom.
It has fans who celebrate eco-terrorism and consider themselves activists.
So. Yeah. It's toxic. Be thankful you haven't interacted with any of them.
"Remember when games didn't need x-ray specs to let you know what was important because you could just tell?"
Man that's hitting close to home right now. I just started playing through the Demon's Souls remake a few days ago, and while it's certainly a pretty-looking game, it's so hard to tell what I'm looking at sometimes because of all the detail and crazy modern-Western-games-studio-lighting-effects and whatnot. Prime example is trying to pick up your bloodstain after you died. I've almost lost my souls on multiple occasions because I couldn't tell which faint glow against the terrain was my bloodstain versus all the other faint glows of lighting effects and other people's bloodstains while I'm being chased by a skeleton that's faster than me and will take me out in 1 swing of his sword.
Yeah what happened to prioritizing the information aspect of the visual design? There has to be a balance between photorealism and playability. At least make pickable objects glow slightly or something. Personally, I would prefer if the Arkham style X-ray vision mode died out. It's been overdone, it yanks you away from the much advertised beautiful graphics every 30 seconds, and it really only serves to remove the suspense from stealth sections.
Seeing callisto protocol be 80% of is nuts. I want to play it one day but even £20 seem too much.
Also YES, i dont think iv ever met an avatar fan im convinced at this point its a tax thing
Id consider myself a fan. Not to the same extent as say a Marvel fan, but I thoroughly enjoy the films.
@@VeritabIlIti I was about to be disparaging, but as someone who loves Fallout 4 it’d be a bit hypocritical of me to dog on someone for liking Avatar. I guess I can see at least some of the appeal, even if I can’t share in the enjoyment.
They should've done what Alien vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar did: had separate campaigns for the different races that're fighting against each other. And also make it a level by level shooter rather than a Jiminy Cockthroat game
So, like the tie-in generic shooter that came out when the original movie released?
My guess on what would be better is “exploration game or game where you have to use the beautiful environment and fauna to get places and then maybe murder some asshole colonists with them,” feels like it would fit the fantasy of being blue cat people who are one with nature a bit better.
I don't know how I've never seen avatar in that light, but they live in an idyllic paradise, have no natural predators and their whole ecosystem is literally managed by a hivemind that makes their houses literally grow from trees
Maybe it's because these movies are renowned for being impossible to think about
0:46 I mean, yeah? Minus the whole sewer people exaggeration, Avatar appeals to, and I mean it in the most neutral way possible, a casual audience. The type of person that will go to the movies, go "wow that's neat", and move on with their lives as opposed to writing ten billion shipfics of Jake/Neytiri or something. The clearest example of a silent majority that comes to my mind.
The crafting phallis of the Jiminy cocktail throat seems particularly egregious here because isn't the whole message of Avatar "don't strip mine nature?" Especially making you play as a Navi seems to be blind to the point of making Stevie Wonder blush
Now I'm imagining Yahtzee as Mario but replacing the goombas for seagulls
Avatar is like the Emperor's New Clothes in that it's bad, but for some reason the overall perception is that it's good and therefore it makes billions.
The only reason I hope for more entries in this franchise is to see more blue cat Yahtzees in a future video lol
I know things change but I miss the imps. Please Yahtzee, if the twats who fucked up the escapist don't own them shoot us an imp once in a while.
They were built into the logo of Zero Punctuation; there's no way they aren't under copyright lock and key.
The dog's fine, no need to worry about a copyright lawsuit
Avatar is great. I am enthusiastic about it in my own way (watch motion picture, enjoy it, move on with my life)
I love an off the chain Yahtzee.
It’s like watching a rabid dog go savage a bunch of kids that bullied you and with roughly the same amount of tears 😂
Every week I get to relisten to the amazing theme of fully ramblomatic and I ALSO get to hear a fun review
i am passionate about avatar, have been since i saw the first one. still need to pick up this game
The beginning reminded me of a great moment from a let's play channel called Friends Without Benefits where one of them asked the other "Have you seen Avatar?" who then promptly went on a 3 minute tirade about how everyone saw Avatar, but noone remembers it really, and how it make a bajillion dollars but has had no impact on anything, only for the guy who originally asked him to say "I mean, The Last Airbender...". It feels like everyone knows OF Avatar, and associates the word to the film, but that's about the limit of it's impact on the world, is just making Avatar, the Airbender one, slightly more annoying to ask about because you need to clarify it every time.
Huh, just opened youtube and saw a 9s old video, hi :D
Hi :D
Saying "Dances with Wolves" but showing a blue tinted shot of "The Last of the Mohicans" was brilliant!
Very much digging the new animation style, really brings the whole Ramblomatic to life!
I don't understand how humans could master interstellar travel and establish oppresive colonies on foreign planets, but haven't figured out how to make glass that could withstand being hit by an arrow.
The arrows are as big as a person, probably weigh something like 5kg, and are fired by a nearly 4m bow with who knows what draw weight. The relative kinetic energy between bullets and arrows night favor bullets dramatically, but KE doesn't really determine penetration, that's more determined by momentum, which is much more favorable to the heavier object, with even normal human hunting arrows having twice the momentum of a bullet.
While it's not quite the same issue, consider the example that bullet proof vests are often fairly useless against knives.
Also keep in mind that, as dumb as it is, they have in other places used the handwave that these aren't the military, they're private security for a penny pinching corporation and everything is lowest bidder.
@@SimonBuchanNz But why didn't they put more armor on the stuff in the second movie after the results of the previous one?
@@moonjelly5 having not seen it... shrug? Anyway I'd just be inventing reasons for decisions made by characters on Earth we don't even know the names of, most likely.
They have the tech to resist arrows. The tech just vanished half way through the first movie.
Because Humans bad
It would be nice if games were designed around being able to find the objective without the marker.
0:35 it’s incredibly bizarre. The sequel was one of the most successful of all time but I saw literally no one talk about it online, and I just assumed it failed until I googled and saw otherwise. How can something be so successful and literally no one mentions it?
It's such a missed opportunity that they didn't work more on stealth combat, the Far Cry games had fun stealth gameplay and it would make so much sense in this scenario. But no, all the combat gameplay I have seen of this consists of you being able to take out mechs with a bow and arrow and shoot down gunships with a few shots from an assault rifle.
What, you think ubisoft allows fun in their games?
"Couldn't give a single cerulean skid-mark," is possibly one of the most poetic things I've ever heard. XD
Finally some content to spend work watching
I kept expecting someone to tell the cats they need to play Twing-Twang. iykyk
Damn dude that is one hell of a long-haul callback!
What was even the name of that God of War rip-off? It was so half-assed Yahtz didn't even play anything more than the demo for that review, if I remember right
@@AnotherCraig Good (eh) ol' Heavenly Sword, and yep. Yahtz didn't play the full game, and as somebody who *did* play a pretty good chunk of it when I was younger, I don't fucking blame the man xD
0:48 that aged well
so very well
@@vystaz Yep, starting laughing my arse off
The best comparison to the Avatar franchise is a tech demo game ala Wii Sports. Sure lots of people will have watched/ played it, but would anyone say its memorable beyond the broad strokes? Probably not.
Finally first to a new Fully Ramblomatic video. Collect your early watcher pass here folks!
Music is great, still could use a tweak. Appreciate the passion and craft you all bring!
I did watch the last Avatar movie and basically I can say the seats were filled by the following:
-families looking to entertain their kids for a couple of hours
-people who cling to every pop culture media they are advertised to
-weird high schoolers with nothing better to do
Only reason I was there was my dad and I needed to kill time and nothing else.
Dont forget furries who want to fantasize about banging the inflatosmurfs.
Ah, part of the first category.
4th category - people who are interested in the latest VFX and want to see it on the biggest screen possible - I saw them talking about it on corridor crew channel and thought why not, should be interesting
-weird offspring-father duos with nothing better to do
Added that for ya, hehe
J/k though, spendin' time with fam is good stuff heh
Can watch the most "whatever" stuff with the kids. Avatar ain't too bad, tolerable entertainment (blue dudes look super-duper weird, aesthetically, to me anyway lol)
@@mukkah lol true, spending Christmas with my dad is sort of that. Though I’m actually an adult just trying to make sure to spend time with my dad and make sure he is well.
It wasn’t bad, but I felt like I got the same impression from the first movie. Honestly, I ended up booting up Subnautica again after the movie and having fun with that instead.
I'm enjoying the game a lot but I also love the worldbuilding of Pandora. I've been flying around on my ikran for hours, just exploring, vibing, and doing side quests and collectibles. The fan community on the internet also likes it. And yes, they (we? We) exist 😅
I asked my girlfriend about this movie when I saw the game pop for pre-order. I asked her: “So what did you think of this movie? It really wasn’t anything spectacular and honestly I thought it was overrated.” My girlfriend replied, “Well, it was a very pretty movie…but yeah.”
The movie was lovely in the theater when I watched it, but I quite literally forgot about it afterwards. Odd, that.
Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas everyone!
God damn it, I laughed every time your Na’vi depiction came on screen. Every time
Love the use of turning the background red again once immersion is broken
This episode has an incredible density of fantastic jokes. Perhaps that's because there's not much to say about the game.
A golden syrup bush......what a marvellous planet we must steal it immediately
I almost would call the Avatar IP a sleeper hit, but it’s more like a blackout hit. It’s super successful and but nobody remembers why or how. It’s just a gap in memory.
I'm in my mid 30s, I remember when Avatar came out and everyone said it was good but nobody claimed to be a fan.
It's such a weird property, it's apparently super popular but I don't know anyone who cares about it.
Repeat the same thing with the 2nd film
And now it seems like the game will follow the trend
Funniest ZP this year. Good stuff
You mean FR.
@@theviniso yeah for real it was the funniest zp this year
@@mrwires232 Okay, good one lol
The video game adaptation Avatar got on the Xbox 360 was really good
Im glad you came too the same conclusion of navi having it piss easy compared to earths nature. "Planet privledge" is the perfect summery
Honestly the one thing I wish this game had that personally would really enjoy is an option for stereoscopic 3D output. Because I think that's one of the big things for the avatar movies. They are made to be seen in 3D and I feel like having this new game also have a 3D mode would have been pretty cool. Especially since I'm currently looking at getting a Sony PlayStation 3D display to view a bunch of 3D content.
I'm suddenly picturing a game where you play as an Ewok trying to survive Imperial occupation and all of the local megafauna. Remember also that Ewoks eat people.