first video game i ever played was gta san on ps2 i was 6 years old, i also had narc, and many other games, none age appropriate, big surprise i grew up to be a criminal.
Marcus blowing his cover, murdering a ton of people and demanding a nuclear strike because a bouncer insulted his outfit might be the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
@@vetreas366 Honestly, more games need a sensible and nonsensical option for infiltration. You can either go straight forward and go in the easy, boring way, or you can travel half-way across the map in an exciting car chase, murder half the police force, and _then_ blow up the local power station (That, conveniently, doesn't actually affect any other buildings except the Big Bad's lair) so you can open a motorized gate by hand.
The sad thing is: the twist of NARC and KRAK being led by the same person is actually quite brilliant. Creating an government-sanctioned official agency that is dedicated to removing your competition is a stroke of a genius, that's supervillain (or big US company) type move. And her immediately force-transferring the protagonists to NARC as soon as they started getting too deep and stepping onto her heels is excellent too. But why did they had to fuick it up by making her then do the dumb saturday morning cartoon villain things immediately after?
Like, it doesn't take that much to make it work, just have them be better than she expected and make that link by themselves, hell in the penultimate mission Marcus could have maybe done just that. Then them going to KRAK island and messing everything up would make more sense. I'm still not sure why us taking out the people KRAK was supplying was taking out competition though. I am going to worry I missed something there for a bit
@@Tehsnakerer Nah I don't think you missed anything. I think this was a great idea as Neko pointed out, but then the writters got lost in the details, or perhaps there was a disconnect between writters and the rest of the dev team. Like, the devs came up with this missions where you killed somoene, and writters were still developing only the general plot points that led to this idea that in general is genius. So somehow, perhaps in a rush to finish the game, it was agreed you were killing the suppliers rather than competitors cuz... and... yeah they lost track, but couldn't just thread it all together. Reminds me of another game (one you could cover!) Cry of fear. Originally cry of fear was about an unnamed, no personality main character helping other people with all sorts of mental issues who would be NPCs handing you quests. It was later remaed into the plot it is today with a main protagonist, Simon, and the whole game is about his and only his issues. But this created an issue: some enemies in the game represent mental illnesses or issues he doesn't have. Like a mom with a baby that has a knife, perhaps symoblism of a loss or even an abortion? either things Simon never went through. Or the children that are meant to be victims of a serial killer that... is no longer in the game. The game and plot are still fantastic, but you can see the evidence of this previous alpha versions getting mixed up in the final game.
@@Tehsnakerer a bit off topic, but how do you feel about Bioshock, Infamous and Mass Effect? In some videos you kind of alude to your thoughts about them(mostly Mass Effect to be honest), but i never get your whole perspective.
That POW POW POW never gets old. Its like one of the most perfect transitions when it comes to intentionally or unintentionally serious moments in video games. In other words, I like to see it as a running gag.
i'd be prefectly happy if every tehsnakerer continued to use that transition from this point on, hell go back and reupload all his old videos with that transition spliced in, i'd watch all his videos again if he did that
It's eery how Deus Ex Human Revolution mimics the open-world aspect just ever so slightly with this game. From downtown america, to downtown asia to climax island place. Maybe war on prosthetics isn't so different from war on drugs.
There are other games which follow that kind of trail. The original _Deux Ex,_ for instance. It's possible that they're drawing on a common inspiration.
It might be firing into a pedestrian crowd for no reason, but Jack and Marcus are presumably the proteges of officers Hit Man and Max Force from the old arcade game and those two were firm believers in "if someone partakes of the divine cocaine, we're going to murder the entire city" approach to policing. So clearly Jack and Marcus were paying attention to their masters words about the value of human life and what the law says. Sadly Jack and Marcus did not pick up on their fashion sense, which would have paired superbly with the gritty noughts style.
i think you've sort of incidentally described the tonal superposition that defines Judge Dredd, especially in the weird way that 2000AD stuff and especially the edgier parts of Dredd canon threaded into aughts angst
44:05 Oh...wow. This cutscene is _extremely_ dark and tragic, and hits like a truck. If the whole story went this direction, we could've had something special here. Jesus. I swear it's like there were two writers for this game, and they both absolutely hated eachother.
It really feels like it's from a completely different game, one that was still actually trying to say something. Because if they were still trying to go for actual satire, making one of the protagonists an addict himself is actually pretty clever. Make Jack painfully aware how utterly arbitrary the difference between him and the people he's arresting and gunning down in droves is, to contrast with an unsympathetic and uncaring Marcus whose focused solely on "cleaning up the streets". ...But at this point I'm writing fanfiction for a game that really does not deserve it.
Jose sounding legitimately crushed that he has to let one of his former close friends get murdered by the gang and trying to do him one last favor for old time's sake is honestly pretty sad on its own.
As a non-gamerer Snake is the vidya channel I keep coming back to. I've seen some of his vids something like 4-5×, his brand of dry humor never fails to get me.
I love Snake's idea of a game with two protagonists, one a clean-cut good cop with better aim and weapons, the other a thug or scrappy bad cop with worse training who uses drugs to improve his abilities. I think that'd make for a great experience, something similar to Max Payne 3.
So, during the tutorial Jack is demoted back to a beat cop, and the game teaches you how to flash a badge... a badge Jack has hanging on his chest already because he's wearing a cop uniform. Makes perfect sense!
Also, I've just realized: he's wearing a completely *different* cop uniform than every other officer serving with this department. Lol, how did that get through, why did nobody notice that? It's not much of a uniform if it's not uniformed, lol.
"Now we have access to the 'Asia" button." That's it, I'm sold. This game is such a goofy and fun mess, I genuinely feel you when you talk about it being dead serious and not satirical, but sometimes it really does seem to be laughing with you. Also, your puns are absolutely *criminal.*
See, this is why we love you Snake. You can make an hour+ long video about a relatively obscure PS2 game from a defunct company that got middling reviews at launch and somehow make not only your video but the game itself utterly compelling.
Nothing more like an analysis of a janky and amusing Midway remake of an arcade game for a christmas special. Thanks for blessing us with this video, man.
I find it kind of funny how the joke of lampshading your own tropes went from something that was new and surprising to itself being tired and generic. Looking at this game now in 2021, the jab at the villain's Oscar speech felt like the game was trying to quickly gloss over one of the very few interesting things it was trying to do. Granted, I don't think it was doing it very well, but it was trying something lol. Also, every joke in this game will never be funnier than this video being tagged as GTA on TH-cam.
52:26 I think the icon is an ampoule, used for storing small amounts of medicines. Makes sense as it would be easier to store and distribute the substance as the glass container prevent it from contacting air and does not have a sharp point or plunger that can be accidentally depressed compared to a syringe. Just a guess, love your work! I find myself revisiting your Saint Row 2022 video every so often, such a great deconstruction of that game.
The most gangster thing about this video is you willingly taking a monetization hit just so you could critique the game's music choice. Love the shout-out to DMX as well, rip. Screw this dumb music copyright system. Wish it never became a thing.
I absolutely love that you have enough videos under your belt, that you can start not only using video specific inside jokes but also joking about the fact they have been used several times. "also known as... the docks" cracked me up XD Love your analytical style mixed with weird eurojank and the early 2000s videogames. Keep it up man! 👍
I remember seeing an add for this EGM back in the day. The tagline on the add was "At a friend price of 19.99". Even the add was a reference to drug dealing. Midway was WILD.
As a self professed expert on these kinds of binary morality systems, I've only ever seen two ways to make it work. The first is to make it too minor an aspect to be able to put it on the back of the box, which in AAA games kills the point outright. But it's no less effective for it's triviality and nothing proves this better than Bastion, a game where there's only one two choices and they're both right at the very end of the game, yet they're both incredibly meaningful and the first in particular lead to one of my first "powerful storytelling" experiences in a game. And it's BECAUSE they didn't have to design the entire game around such choices that they're so meaningful. The other option is what NARC exemplifies the issue on: You have to be willing to cut gameplay from each side. AAA publishers are terrified the player won't squeeze every bit of content possible from the game and would NEVER willingly do that for anything remotely big budget. Infamous is probably the biggest example of this where you don't actually lose out on anything because you just do the exact same thing in different ways. it can lead to meaningful storytelling but gameplay wise it's just shuffling things about. Mass Effect and Infamous epitomize the "it's just doing the same thing in a different manner" aspect of binary morality to the point you have no reason to not go all in on one side for the best benefits, meaning it's really just one choice at the start. Then you have something like Bioshock and NARC, where the evil option is never worth it because they don't have the balls to actually penalize you for "making the """tough""" choice to do what's right" with heavy handed rewards for being virtuous and basically just giving more ultimately less important consumables for being evil. This just turns any "evil" action into a waste of time that's not even actual content as much as an advertised feature that gets in the way of doing the meaningful content, or even outright denies you content because they KNOW that most people just want the illusion of choice but still choose to default to good. As a result game is naturally going to disincentivize even bothering with it's "moral choice" at all times. To this day the only big budget series I've seen that actually gets you HAVE to be willing to say "you lose content X Y and Z because you chose to take the higher road" AND understands "Playing evil requires a wholly different approach that reflects your intentions" is Arkane's works including both Dishonored and Prey2017. Prey 2017 starts binary but splits off but Dishonored is undeniably a "shallow binary morality game" without the shallow bit. Is it subtle? No not really, but that doesnt mean it doesnt do it well. The vast majority of your powers get a MASSIVE reduction is usability if you're going for non-lethal, with multiple ability flat out ONLY useful for killing. The chaos system affects enemy placement and even level layouts. The lengths required to take out targets nonlethally make just sniping them with a crossbow actually worth considering ESPECIALLY on higher difficulties. To say nothing of the inherent difference in how the game plays if you go guns blazing sword swinging as opposed to ghost stealth, or if you want to do a bit of both and just wanna get through it. In short you both undeniably lose certain content if you go for goody two shoes AND you have a different gameplay experience when comparing good vs evil. ....Man i didnt expect to gain such a better understanding of why i love one of my absolutely favorite games ever when i clicked on a documentary-review of a game I'd never even heard of. Well played Teh.
I'd argue that there's a third option, which Bioshock is a great example of: Have a narrative which your morality system is built to support. Bioshock is, in large part, a refutation of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy. (This is obvious if you know anything about Rand's philosophy, or notice that Andrew Ryan is based on and named after Rand.) Objectivism essentially claims that everyone should do what's best for them and only them, because altruism is evil. (There's...not exactly more depth, but there's more detail, which doesn't really change the picture.) If you follow Ayn Rand's philosophy when playing Bioshock, you'll selfishly kill the Little Sisters and get some ADAM. But if you act altruistically and let them go free, you get more ADAM in the long run. This mechanic is presenting a world where acting altruistically _is better for everyone_ in the long run, where selfishness is only destructive. Kinda like Rapture as a whole-it ran on Ryan's Objectivist politics, and they destroyed the city. That's not an error, that's what the game's narrative is _about._ The game's morality system, shallow as it is, does exactly as much as it needs to support that narrative.
@@timothymclean Couldn't agree more! I really moreso meant how, from a mechanical standpoint, Bioshock doesnt really change anything other than lock you out of things when going evil, which some would argue is a letdown when it places so much emphasis on the morality. I think it's one of the things 2 improved on by making it's moral choices just as emphasized but not as heavily implying an effect on gameplay. Narratively however, like you said it's a _perfect_ example of how Bioshock interwove narrative and gameplay, and is certainly the kind of 'risk' it was much better for taking than if it had played it safer because of the aforementioned mechanical stuff.
Vampyr is a game that does this well - eating humans gives you SO much experience in a game that is generally rather tough, but the story incentivizes not killing people. You can get that xp by grinding instead, but that requires grinding. The game makes being the good guy harder than being the bad guy while still making it worth it, with both options being viable.
1:04:45 - My dude has been taking fighting lessons from Akiyama off-screen. Though saying that just makes me want to play a sidestory where Akiyama has to teach 2 foreign nationals how to fight and get himself involved with the Triad or something like that. Maybe it happens somewhere between the Millennium Tower incident and Yakuza 4.
1:13:00 actually, as a former addict and someone who still struggles to be completely clean (as in, i still take it once a month and eat shroom every odd month i guess) this is surprisingly accurate, atleast when refering to shrooms, thats kind of how i feel. what it isnt is the reason i take drugs in the first place, but atleast half of it isnt bullshit
I have an incredibly vivid memory of a game I played a demo of in the mall as a child and I had no idea what game it was until today. Also the superfly soundtrack is way too good for this game but it was also way too good for the movie so I suppose its fitting.
You always come out with the most interesting obscure PS2 jank games to talk about. What this game really needs is the "ye ye ye" song from Anonymous Agony
Glad we got one more "The docks" gag before years end. That said this game was always weird to me, I remember ads back when it was coming out especially about it being cheap. Only review I remember being really mean to the game other than middling was G4's Xplay crew when they reviewed it. Kinda forgot it existed at a certain point.
They cheated themselves more ammo for the rocket launcher in the attract mode than you can carry in Fortnite. They were extremely afraid that they would not get a good shot.
While I haven't played this, I do wish we got more auto-aim shooters about leaping through the air like a mad man, I always have a soft spot for that and it seems there's very few if any at all games like that nowadays.
I want you to know that I’m watching this immediately after finishing Face Full Of Eyes’ video about Swat 4, and I feel like these games take place in the same universe now.
A bit ironic that straight-edge Marcus' climactic battle in the war against Liquid Soul is best fought *on* Liquid Soul, seeing as it buffs your melee attacks, which are all you can use. ...And then you immediately find out what it *is*.
I actually played the shitty PC port that you mentioned in this video about 3 years ago. Funny thing to note about it is that they didn't even bother to get the in-game cutscenes running in-engine. They just put heavily compressed video files of the cutscenes in place and called it a day. It also means that the drug effects don't carry into cutscenes and make them unintentionally hilarious, like at 1:05:36. Also gonna say, first time I tried getting the PC version, it didn't include the cutscenes for the Kowloon section of the game for some reason. I didn't even realize it until I looked up gameplay of the sections and saw actual cutscenes. I had to go out of my way to get another version to get around that. Man, NARC is a stupid game. It reminds me of another stupid Midway game, SpyHunter: Nowhere to Run, starring Dwayne Johnson, but that may be due to the fact that the PC port of that is also garbage.
I have to say that the exchange of "It'll be like the OK Corral!" and "Almost everyone died there" does seem like pretty good banter. The brash guy who's got courage but perhaps not knowledge contrasting with the more cynical, in-the-know one. Shame we didn't get more of that.
"It turns out I need crime to justify my existence fighting it." You have uncovered the truth of police militarization and "The War on Drugs", and not realized it.
Will save this video for tomorrow morning, i'll make some coffee to go along! Just wanted to say that I really enjoy your content, they way you make these video and write the script for the review(or essay? Or just some thoughts put together? I don't know how to call it, your videos are to me this kind of hybrid between review, walkthrough and analysis. Its a nice a mix) on whatever videogame you're making a video about. I also really enjoy watching the game in action, its always so nice and comfy to watch gameplays of janky and not well know games. Keep it up and have a nice new year!
You know, I left the credits going to read the comments and your Jelly Joe bit at the very end spooked the shit out of me. Great video as always! POP POP POP--
This was a weird trip of game. I'm totally sharing this with my friends cause its just so surreal. Thanks for another hour of fun Snake as a christmas gift, you and Ross Scott do god's work.
Spoiler warning for an old movie The secret of liquid soul sounds like it might be inspired by a 1973 movie called Soylent Green (Which takes place in 2022 btw) in which a detective discovers that Soylent green, a wafer that was produced to feed people during a time of complete lack of resources, is made of pulverized remains of corpses. Upon discovering the secret, the detective yells "Soylent green is people!". The scene with Marcus reminded that narrative of the movie to a certain degree though I can't say I'm certain that it's an inspired scene or a coincidentally similar plot twist.
the UI and gameplay mechanics appear to have many parts which are identical to those found in double action: boogaloo and it's making me feel like i'm in a berenstein/berenstain universe situation
You have unlocked hidden sleeper memories deep in the back of my mind. I rented this game for a weekend from a west coast video as a kid and i had completely forgotten, I got to the point where you're a beatcop and just murdered civilians and thugs for hours. I never got any farther in the game than that.
Amazing video essay on this tacky gem from the 2000's. I'm happy you featured clips of True Crime and it would be awesome if you could do a review on True Crime: Streets of LA. That game is a treasure trove of jank and hilariously stupid nonsense, but it is very fun and Nick Kang could make for a interesting case study on how a cop should never act.
The TH-cam "Browse Game" tag thinking this game is Grand Theft Auto -- the 1997 one, for the PSX, from the topdown perspective -- is slaying me every second I see it. Upon further consideration, I gotta say, the "fire tear gas into a building and merc people trying to escape it" is darkly hilarious; Marcus has been on the stupidly-named-but-only-just anti-drug task force for like a day, and is already Waco'ing dance clubs. On foreign soil, no less! Our ATF couldn't fuck up that hard, that quickly, if they tried -- AND THEY HAVE!
What a great belated Christmas present, also I love how youtube doesn't even recognize the game in the description so it lists the original GTA instead. Absolute poetry. Great video as always man!
Dude thanks for this whole video. It brings back so much memories of me and my cousin fucking around and completing this game back in middle school. We never understood the game but it was so much fun.
I have to remind myself constantly when looking at NARC PS2, that yes it does exist, and yes it is banking on brand recognition from an arcade game about _rocket-launching SWAT officers._
Say what you will, any game with Pusherman and Golden Brown on the soundtrack is doing something right. Even if tonally they make no sense in an action game like this.
This game, like true crime, totally *could* have been cool, fun games though, and the result is fun in its own way to sift through. I mean, how can you forget killing nearly a thousand men over the main story events, only to begin fighting vampires and dragons in the bad storyline of true crime:streets of LA, to suddenly get your ass handed to you by a skinny, old, mystic chinese immagrant who appears to maybe also be immortal. OR literally becoming a samurai cop in NY and fighting people with a wooden katana then stepping into your bulletproof escalade to abuse your sirens and make everyone move out of your way as you speed down to the next objective was fucking FUN but as soon as you have to watch another cutscene or listen to any dialogue or do anything that isnt fighting, shooting or driving the game is a slog. Those are the areas gta always excelled at and it helped glue things together so gta san andreas still feels better to play than true crime even if technically true crime is miles ahead in terms of shooting being way more fluid, clearer audio, hand to hand fighting having its own system, and fully branching story, slo-mo mechanics, and even a morality system.
This channel is awesome. I’m not big on games but the content here is so interesting and unique that I end up watching/listening to hour long videos of games I’ve never heard of and will never play lol 👍🏾
I wasnt expecting to see a clip from the Cryme Time playthrough of Fight for New York in a Tehsnakerer video. Great job, now I'm depressed because I remember the good old days of the Best Friends Zaibatsu...
I absolutely have to see the footage from you playing this with your mates, you guys sound like you're having a blast with this weird anomaly of a game
My cousin bought this PS2 which came with an LOAD of bootleg CDs in like 2007, and NARC was one of the gems in it. I didn't play it too much but running around the streets for a bit burned Curtis Mayfield's Pusherman in my brain, which is a good thing I'm grateful for this game doing.
20:20: Isn't it weird that Tehsnakerer talked about pointless morality systems, and two of the three examples were from games that had a point to make with them? _Bioshock_ giving you short-term rewards for selfish behavior but better long-term ones for kindness was a direct refutation of the philosophy of -Andrew Ryan- Ayn Rand, which is kinda the thesis of the whole game; meanwhile, Shepherd's Renegade and Paragon options in _Mass Effect_ were supposed to represent whether _humanity as a whole_ would put its own needs above those of other races or work with them to build a better galaxy. They didn't have a lot of _mechanical_ depth, but there was _substance_ there. AFAIK, there wasn't anything like that in _Infamous,_ the other game showed there. And most games with morality systems were a lot closer to that than they were to _Bioshock_ or _Mass Effect,_ adding morality systems not because it suited the story being told but because it was a way to add Player Choice(TM) without having to construct much extra content.
As much as I'd like to think Bioshock's morality system is a stroke of thematic genius, the reality is that its framed so utterly terribly that it never gives you any sort of appreciable choice. "DO YOU MURDER CHILD" is not a riveting moral dilemma. "DO YOU MURDER CHILD FOR VERY MINOR INCREASED REWARD" is not more convincing because it only takes saving a few Little Sisters before you get the bigger, better reward. If they game made you wait until 75% of the way through for the good morality reward, maybe they'd have something there, but that's not really the case. Furthermore, the game's too easy for a bit of extra ADAM in the moment to be that enticing. The other thing is that giving the player more ADAM for playing the default, normal, halfway decent human being I think UNDERMINES the thematic elements. It places the reward as something material, and considering Ayn Rand/Andrew Ryan placed too much important on material things, it messes with the message that should be told. The real long-term reward is what the story gives you - Jack gets a family that loves him and that he gets to see grow up and succeed, and who at his side when he finally dies. *That* is much more thematically appropriate.
@@innoclarke7435 Did you read my post? Bioshock never tries to act like both options are equally valid. There is one that it wants you to take. Doing bad things for short-term profit is bad, which is reflected in both the Little Sisters and in the fall of Rapture, which happened because a bunch of businessmen pursued their self-interest to the detriment of the community they lived in.
@@timothymclean I sure did. Rather, I should ask if you read mine. Bioshock does, in fact, try to portray both options as equally valid. The game at no point indicates that going the good route will be beneficial to you. Indeed, you end up getting 320 more ADAM harvesting every Little Sister than by saving them. Saving them only gives you a few tonics which *sound* really useful, but aren't that handy in practice ,and the Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid. The rest of the rewards are resources like ammo and hypos that you almost certainly aren't struggling to keep stocked to begin with because the game's economy is deeply skewed in your favour. I love Bioshock 1, but its morality system simply fails. Bioshock 2 actually does" better" in this regard, reducing the evil path's ADAM bonus to just 90 more than rescuing all of the Little Sisters. Further, since Bioshock 2's difficulty is a lot better tuned to actually challenge you, the good reward of having the Sisters harvest faster helps you keep more of your resources. In Bioshock 1, you straight up don't even have to think about resources, you'll just end up maxing out everything without trying. Bioshock 2 tried to force you to use them, making a reward allowing you to save those resources have more weight. Mechanically, neither game's morality system really matters terribly much at all in active decision making. In this way, they're both failures. Using the mechanics to counter the very ideas that Rapture was built upon, Bioshock 2 improves. It's just that simple. The only reason Bioshock 1 doesn't give you even more reward for harvesting the Little Sisters is because someone at 2K or Irrational didn't have the balls to do so. Funny thing is, though, is that even it rewarded you more for being evil, it would've still been able to excoriate Jack in the ending cutscenes, while also having it be interesting for Jack to achieve a lot of material success through cold, selfish materialism, like Ryan did. As it is, the way the rewards are calculated and the game is balanced don't contribute to assertively making *any* statement. A man chooses, but it doesn't give you enough to the system to make the choice have any weight.
@@innoclarke7435 So let's see if I understand your argument correctly. Bioshock portrays the choices as equivalent because it doesn't explicitly say "Saving the little girl is the right choice." Having the good choice be both the optimal choice and the moral one is therefore a failure to live up to your standards of moral choices, and not a way of Bioshock treating one choice as the right choice. From this, I gather that you think choices in games need to either have the consequences spelled out clearly (ie, "Saving the Little Sisters gives more ADAM in the long run") or make them balanced in some way. I can see that making sense from a purely mechanical standpoint; through that lens, a choice which hurts the player without them being able to predict it would be bad. And you know what? *My initial comment noted that the Little Sister choices in Bioshock were weak from a mechanical standpoint!* I agree! But, I think the choice system serves another purpose, one which is impeded by the player knowing with full certainty that saving the Sisters is beneficial in the long run. Analyzing the Little Sisters as a purely mechanical system is kinda like analyzing Resident Evil 1 as a pure action game. The clunky controls and limited camera angles detract from RE1 as a third-person shooter. But those elements are crucial components of the game's horror! Complaining about RE1's crappy combat system would be missing the point! The same is true of analyzing a (good) moral choice system the way you'd analyze a character upgrade system.
All the games you had as a kid makes me think your parents were trying to raise a criminal
You know now that you say that.... It makes a lot of sense
Siblings for me ✋
first video game i ever played was gta san on ps2 i was 6 years old, i also had narc, and many other games, none age appropriate, big surprise i grew up to be a criminal.
Marcus blowing his cover, murdering a ton of people and demanding a nuclear strike because a bouncer insulted his outfit might be the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
Has strong Ride to Hell vibes.
Jake: "A flimsy electric fence?! Quick, to the eighteen wheeler! We have a dam to demolish!"
@@vetreas366 Honestly, more games need a sensible and nonsensical option for infiltration. You can either go straight forward and go in the easy, boring way, or you can travel half-way across the map in an exciting car chase, murder half the police force, and _then_ blow up the local power station (That, conveniently, doesn't actually affect any other buildings except the Big Bad's lair) so you can open a motorized gate by hand.
@@marley7868 GTS marley it's late
@@GoredonTheDestroyer gastrointestinal
❤😊
1:00:12
The start of Marcus's brilliance
my absolute favorite feature in original NARC is that dogs don't die and just turn into smaller dogs when shot and run away unharmed
Thats genius, literally no good person wants to kill dogs even if they are on the wrong side of the NARC TEAM.
Last of us 2 should take some notes
Reminds me of the line from seven psychopaths: You can kill women but not dogs
Just like real life
@@iamjustkiwi even the dog in Twisted Metal is unkillable
DEA: "winners don't do drugs"
NARC: "but they're pretty useful in a pinch."
“Saying NARC has a strong anti-drug message is like saying a monster truck rally has a strong anti-car message” obliterated my sides
Or Cuties having a strong anti-child porn message.
So I guess the video has a strong anti-sides message
he's brilliant.
The sad thing is: the twist of NARC and KRAK being led by the same person is actually quite brilliant. Creating an government-sanctioned official agency that is dedicated to removing your competition is a stroke of a genius, that's supervillain (or big US company) type move. And her immediately force-transferring the protagonists to NARC as soon as they started getting too deep and stepping onto her heels is excellent too. But why did they had to fuick it up by making her then do the dumb saturday morning cartoon villain things immediately after?
Like, it doesn't take that much to make it work, just have them be better than she expected and make that link by themselves, hell in the penultimate mission Marcus could have maybe done just that. Then them going to KRAK island and messing everything up would make more sense.
I'm still not sure why us taking out the people KRAK was supplying was taking out competition though. I am going to worry I missed something there for a bit
@@Tehsnakerer Nah I don't think you missed anything. I think this was a great idea as Neko pointed out, but then the writters got lost in the details, or perhaps there was a disconnect between writters and the rest of the dev team.
Like, the devs came up with this missions where you killed somoene, and writters were still developing only the general plot points that led to this idea that in general is genius. So somehow, perhaps in a rush to finish the game, it was agreed you were killing the suppliers rather than competitors cuz... and... yeah they lost track, but couldn't just thread it all together.
Reminds me of another game (one you could cover!) Cry of fear. Originally cry of fear was about an unnamed, no personality main character helping other people with all sorts of mental issues who would be NPCs handing you quests.
It was later remaed into the plot it is today with a main protagonist, Simon, and the whole game is about his and only his issues. But this created an issue: some enemies in the game represent mental illnesses or issues he doesn't have. Like a mom with a baby that has a knife, perhaps symoblism of a loss or even an abortion? either things Simon never went through. Or the children that are meant to be victims of a serial killer that... is no longer in the game. The game and plot are still fantastic, but you can see the evidence of this previous alpha versions getting mixed up in the final game.
Really happened in London with a thief taker general
@@Tehsnakerer a bit off topic, but how do you feel about Bioshock, Infamous and Mass Effect? In some videos you kind of alude to your thoughts about them(mostly Mass Effect to be honest), but i never get your whole perspective.
ikr.
"Come on Nancy, your husband worked hard to flood the hood with crack"
My god Snake you just don't miss
glorious.
BIG BARS
That POW POW POW never gets old. Its like one of the most perfect transitions when it comes to intentionally or unintentionally serious moments in video games. In other words, I like to see it as a running gag.
Is it pow or POP POP POP?
i'd be prefectly happy if every tehsnakerer continued to use that transition from this point on, hell go back and reupload all his old videos with that transition spliced in, i'd watch all his videos again if he did that
yes he should.
It'd be best used if Snake ever does a video on Animal Crossing. XD
Look thru the 11th floor window
"Cars, guns and bling" is actually a perfect description of 00's rap, as a black person who lived through it.
As a fellow black man I can say that today's rap still talks about all of that shit in spades.
@@GSG-io8zp Idk something to do with my parents. I didn't ask.
Looking Back, the Bling era seems Like a fever dream.
@@shawklan27 There's more cough syrup involved, though.
@@shawklan27 they do but they love snitch on themselves just like back in the day
"The ambassador's dead, you schmuck!" I absolutely adore that line, and I'm not sure why.
It's eery how Deus Ex Human Revolution mimics the open-world aspect just ever so slightly with this game. From downtown america, to downtown asia to climax island place. Maybe war on prosthetics isn't so different from war on drugs.
Climax Island sounds like a porno game show.
There are other games which follow that kind of trail. The original _Deux Ex,_ for instance. It's possible that they're drawing on a common inspiration.
It might be firing into a pedestrian crowd for no reason, but Jack and Marcus are presumably the proteges of officers Hit Man and Max Force from the old arcade game and those two were firm believers in "if someone partakes of the divine cocaine, we're going to murder the entire city" approach to policing. So clearly Jack and Marcus were paying attention to their masters words about the value of human life and what the law says.
Sadly Jack and Marcus did not pick up on their fashion sense, which would have paired superbly with the gritty noughts style.
i think you've sort of incidentally described the tonal superposition that defines Judge Dredd, especially in the weird way that 2000AD stuff and especially the edgier parts of Dredd canon threaded into aughts angst
@@g3intel Albeit Dredd is not ambiguous about whether or not it is satire (especially when it comes to America).
@@arskakarva7474 What are you talking about, it's an instruction manual
I had this game as a pirated PS2 cd. I loved how if you caused mayhem like in GTA you got demtoed from a detective, to a beat cop to a hobo.
That's how I played _State of Emergency_
The Rockstar game about shooting people in a mall.
You pirated a game called NARC? I’m pretty sure you’re on the FBI’s most wanted list now friend.
@@Joe-ib3dy I didn't pirated it. The man selling pirated PS2 games at the open-air market did it.
44:05 Oh...wow. This cutscene is _extremely_ dark and tragic, and hits like a truck. If the whole story went this direction, we could've had something special here. Jesus.
I swear it's like there were two writers for this game, and they both absolutely hated eachother.
This cutscene feel extremely out of place from how good and well edited it is I would love to play an entire game based on that cutscene alone
It really feels like it's from a completely different game, one that was still actually trying to say something. Because if they were still trying to go for actual satire, making one of the protagonists an addict himself is actually pretty clever. Make Jack painfully aware how utterly arbitrary the difference between him and the people he's arresting and gunning down in droves is, to contrast with an unsympathetic and uncaring Marcus whose focused solely on "cleaning up the streets".
...But at this point I'm writing fanfiction for a game that really does not deserve it.
@@joebob4671 this paragraph sounds more intriguing than the entire game odd plot
Jose sounding legitimately crushed that he has to let one of his former close friends get murdered by the gang and trying to do him one last favor for old time's sake is honestly pretty sad on its own.
14:56 I absolutely love how you filled that guy's spine with lead and he literally walked it off like, "Tch... another day in the hood."
"It's gonna be the start of a dark day" "Yeah, night." It's zingers like this that cut you and Ross above the noise. Awesome video as usual.
Is Ross a similar content creator?
@@JunJun-pm4vy Ross's Game Dungeon is quite similar to this, yeah
I don't usually like crossover TH-cam content, but one with Tehsnakerer and Ross would be pretty dope.
@@PenguinDT I dunno
I love Ross Scott but his track record of crossovers has been pretty dicey.
As a non-gamerer Snake is the vidya channel I keep coming back to. I've seen some of his vids something like 4-5×, his brand of dry humor never fails to get me.
I love Snake's idea of a game with two protagonists, one a clean-cut good cop with better aim and weapons, the other a thug or scrappy bad cop with worse training who uses drugs to improve his abilities. I think that'd make for a great experience, something similar to Max Payne 3.
You know, it is rather fitting for a druglord with a Boss Island to have some Metal Gear lying around.
So, during the tutorial Jack is demoted back to a beat cop, and the game teaches you how to flash a badge... a badge Jack has hanging on his chest already because he's wearing a cop uniform. Makes perfect sense!
Also, I've just realized: he's wearing a completely *different* cop uniform than every other officer serving with this department. Lol, how did that get through, why did nobody notice that? It's not much of a uniform if it's not uniformed, lol.
"Now we have access to the 'Asia" button." That's it, I'm sold.
This game is such a goofy and fun mess, I genuinely feel you when you talk about it being dead serious and not satirical, but sometimes it really does seem to be laughing with you.
Also, your puns are absolutely *criminal.*
Tolerance carries over through deaths? Damn, even Xenus wasn’t that harsh.
See, this is why we love you Snake. You can make an hour+ long video about a relatively obscure PS2 game from a defunct company that got middling reviews at launch and somehow make not only your video but the game itself utterly compelling.
Nothing more like an analysis of a janky and amusing Midway remake of an arcade game for a christmas special. Thanks for blessing us with this video, man.
I really miss that era of post-San Andreas “wigger” games.
I was just in the right age to still think this shit was gangsta.
And atop that wigger pile, sits the crown jewel of white hood games
Saints Row.
It's a tragedy that the series lost it's janky 2000's identity.
@@alalvarez7301 I for one prefer it becoming a cartoon, as it was a least different and unique, as well as entertaining.
@@planescaped They could had honestly just made a new IP if they wanted something so wildly different in tone.
@@planescaped The second game is just such an excellent satire that it makes saints row 3 feel like a Phineas Gage style head wound.
@@planescaped preach. if i wanted to play a grittier more realistic saints row i would just play gta
"I can't speak for his NBA track, but I do have three-pointers for this one."
Fucking lmao, didn't catch that one until now
Rest in power, DMX. He knock knocked, Heaven opened up their door, and it was real- the nonstop pop pop of a stainless hero.
@Kelik The Edgelord X DID say he was gonna deliver to him
I find it kind of funny how the joke of lampshading your own tropes went from something that was new and surprising to itself being tired and generic. Looking at this game now in 2021, the jab at the villain's Oscar speech felt like the game was trying to quickly gloss over one of the very few interesting things it was trying to do. Granted, I don't think it was doing it very well, but it was trying something lol.
Also, every joke in this game will never be funnier than this video being tagged as GTA on TH-cam.
The liquid soul icon could be an ampoule, which you draw liquid out of with a syringe after breaking it open
52:26 I think the icon is an ampoule, used for storing small amounts of medicines. Makes sense as it would be easier to store and distribute the substance as the glass container prevent it from contacting air and does not have a sharp point or plunger that can be accidentally depressed compared to a syringe.
Just a guess, love your work!
I find myself revisiting your Saint Row 2022 video every so often, such a great deconstruction of that game.
The most gangster thing about this video is you willingly taking a monetization hit just so you could critique the game's music choice. Love the shout-out to DMX as well, rip. Screw this dumb music copyright system. Wish it never became a thing.
At least Jelly Joe got a happy ending. In the end that's all that really matters.
Man, listening to Teh and his friends laugh his ass off on some stream makes me with for CommentaryComms to return...at least as a stream archive.
I absolutely love that you have enough videos under your belt, that you can start not only using video specific inside jokes but also joking about the fact they have been used several times. "also known as... the docks" cracked me up XD Love your analytical style mixed with weird eurojank and the early 2000s videogames. Keep it up man! 👍
I remember seeing an add for this EGM back in the day. The tagline on the add was "At a friend price of 19.99". Even the add was a reference to drug dealing. Midway was WILD.
The "better known as, THE DOCKS." joke will NEVER, repeat
N E V E R
get old.
when did it start?
@@lavenzavantas Gangland : A Mafia Melting Pot
As a self professed expert on these kinds of binary morality systems, I've only ever seen two ways to make it work.
The first is to make it too minor an aspect to be able to put it on the back of the box, which in AAA games kills the point outright. But it's no less effective for it's triviality and nothing proves this better than Bastion, a game where there's only one two choices and they're both right at the very end of the game, yet they're both incredibly meaningful and the first in particular lead to one of my first "powerful storytelling" experiences in a game. And it's BECAUSE they didn't have to design the entire game around such choices that they're so meaningful.
The other option is what NARC exemplifies the issue on: You have to be willing to cut gameplay from each side. AAA publishers are terrified the player won't squeeze every bit of content possible from the game and would NEVER willingly do that for anything remotely big budget. Infamous is probably the biggest example of this where you don't actually lose out on anything because you just do the exact same thing in different ways. it can lead to meaningful storytelling but gameplay wise it's just shuffling things about. Mass Effect and Infamous epitomize the "it's just doing the same thing in a different manner" aspect of binary morality to the point you have no reason to not go all in on one side for the best benefits, meaning it's really just one choice at the start.
Then you have something like Bioshock and NARC, where the evil option is never worth it because they don't have the balls to actually penalize you for "making the """tough""" choice to do what's right" with heavy handed rewards for being virtuous and basically just giving more ultimately less important consumables for being evil. This just turns any "evil" action into a waste of time that's not even actual content as much as an advertised feature that gets in the way of doing the meaningful content, or even outright denies you content because they KNOW that most people just want the illusion of choice but still choose to default to good. As a result game is naturally going to disincentivize even bothering with it's "moral choice" at all times.
To this day the only big budget series I've seen that actually gets you HAVE to be willing to say "you lose content X Y and Z because you chose to take the higher road" AND understands "Playing evil requires a wholly different approach that reflects your intentions" is Arkane's works including both Dishonored and Prey2017. Prey 2017 starts binary but splits off but Dishonored is undeniably a "shallow binary morality game" without the shallow bit. Is it subtle? No not really, but that doesnt mean it doesnt do it well. The vast majority of your powers get a MASSIVE reduction is usability if you're going for non-lethal, with multiple ability flat out ONLY useful for killing. The chaos system affects enemy placement and even level layouts. The lengths required to take out targets nonlethally make just sniping them with a crossbow actually worth considering ESPECIALLY on higher difficulties. To say nothing of the inherent difference in how the game plays if you go guns blazing sword swinging as opposed to ghost stealth, or if you want to do a bit of both and just wanna get through it. In short you both undeniably lose certain content if you go for goody two shoes AND you have a different gameplay experience when comparing good vs evil.
....Man i didnt expect to gain such a better understanding of why i love one of my absolutely favorite games ever when i clicked on a documentary-review of a game I'd never even heard of. Well played Teh.
I know this is late but if you haven't played LISA: The Painful its probably up your alley
@@marthenheimer5278 I've actually had that recommend to me several times! I've mainly put it off because it seems...well, hella depressing lol.
I'd argue that there's a third option, which Bioshock is a great example of: Have a narrative which your morality system is built to support.
Bioshock is, in large part, a refutation of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy. (This is obvious if you know anything about Rand's philosophy, or notice that Andrew Ryan is based on and named after Rand.) Objectivism essentially claims that everyone should do what's best for them and only them, because altruism is evil. (There's...not exactly more depth, but there's more detail, which doesn't really change the picture.)
If you follow Ayn Rand's philosophy when playing Bioshock, you'll selfishly kill the Little Sisters and get some ADAM. But if you act altruistically and let them go free, you get more ADAM in the long run. This mechanic is presenting a world where acting altruistically _is better for everyone_ in the long run, where selfishness is only destructive. Kinda like Rapture as a whole-it ran on Ryan's Objectivist politics, and they destroyed the city.
That's not an error, that's what the game's narrative is _about._ The game's morality system, shallow as it is, does exactly as much as it needs to support that narrative.
@@timothymclean Couldn't agree more! I really moreso meant how, from a mechanical standpoint, Bioshock doesnt really change anything other than lock you out of things when going evil, which some would argue is a letdown when it places so much emphasis on the morality. I think it's one of the things 2 improved on by making it's moral choices just as emphasized but not as heavily implying an effect on gameplay.
Narratively however, like you said it's a _perfect_ example of how Bioshock interwove narrative and gameplay, and is certainly the kind of 'risk' it was much better for taking than if it had played it safer because of the aforementioned mechanical stuff.
Vampyr is a game that does this well - eating humans gives you SO much experience in a game that is generally rather tough, but the story incentivizes not killing people. You can get that xp by grinding instead, but that requires grinding. The game makes being the good guy harder than being the bad guy while still making it worth it, with both options being viable.
These videos are truly good at analyzing old gaming media that I haven't heard of good stuff.
Man, that one cutscene was surprisingly well done - it's stuff like this that makes me love unknown janky games
1:04:45 - My dude has been taking fighting lessons from Akiyama off-screen. Though saying that just makes me want to play a sidestory where Akiyama has to teach 2 foreign nationals how to fight and get himself involved with the Triad or something like that. Maybe it happens somewhere between the Millennium Tower incident and Yakuza 4.
Akiyama could fit in Narc since he also believes that money are useless
1:13:00 actually, as a former addict and someone who still struggles to be completely clean (as in, i still take it once a month and eat shroom every odd month i guess) this is surprisingly accurate, atleast when refering to shrooms, thats kind of how i feel. what it isnt is the reason i take drugs in the first place, but atleast half of it isnt bullshit
“I have to invert to uninvert my controls.” can be applied to a higher amount of 6th Gen games than it should.
"I need crime to justify my existence fighting it" A great summary for the US' 18 different intelligence agencies.
cant believe the US intelligence agencies are just Queen of Hatred
What a D.A.R.E.devil. Merry New Years, Snake.
I have an incredibly vivid memory of a game I played a demo of in the mall as a child and I had no idea what game it was until today.
Also the superfly soundtrack is way too good for this game but it was also way too good for the movie so I suppose its fitting.
Oh wow, what a way to connect that dot
I gotta say I prefer this type of identity crisis gaming had as opposed to the utterly soul crushing modern identity crisis.
"You have the right to remain stoned" is now my favorite line in a videogame.
"Dude, what if you did weed and gunned them down with your m16"
"I love how they did the drugs in this game"
Actual narcs spotted.
I absolutely love details like the *pop pop pop* transition playing inside the church.
You always come out with the most interesting obscure PS2 jank games to talk about. What this game really needs is the "ye ye ye" song from Anonymous Agony
Glad we got one more "The docks" gag before years end. That said this game was always weird to me, I remember ads back when it was coming out especially about it being cheap. Only review I remember being really mean to the game other than middling was G4's Xplay crew when they reviewed it. Kinda forgot it existed at a certain point.
They cheated themselves more ammo for the rocket launcher in the attract mode than you can carry in Fortnite. They were extremely afraid that they would not get a good shot.
While I haven't played this, I do wish we got more auto-aim shooters about leaping through the air like a mad man, I always have a soft spot for that and it seems there's very few if any at all games like that nowadays.
I want you to know that I’m watching this immediately after finishing Face Full Of Eyes’ video about Swat 4, and I feel like these games take place in the same universe now.
When Mr Big popped in a mech I had to make sure I wasn't seeing things.
honestly its one of the few moments where the game feels like it remembers its heritage
A bit ironic that straight-edge Marcus' climactic battle in the war against Liquid Soul is best fought *on* Liquid Soul, seeing as it buffs your melee attacks, which are all you can use.
...And then you immediately find out what it *is*.
So you know what else was hip?
Hop.
I almost spit my coffee when he said that, good lord. lmao
I actually played the shitty PC port that you mentioned in this video about 3 years ago. Funny thing to note about it is that they didn't even bother to get the in-game cutscenes running in-engine. They just put heavily compressed video files of the cutscenes in place and called it a day. It also means that the drug effects don't carry into cutscenes and make them unintentionally hilarious, like at 1:05:36.
Also gonna say, first time I tried getting the PC version, it didn't include the cutscenes for the Kowloon section of the game for some reason. I didn't even realize it until I looked up gameplay of the sections and saw actual cutscenes. I had to go out of my way to get another version to get around that.
Man, NARC is a stupid game. It reminds me of another stupid Midway game, SpyHunter: Nowhere to Run, starring Dwayne Johnson, but that may be due to the fact that the PC port of that is also garbage.
Finding out jelly Joe seems to be doing well at the end there is the true ending to narc
I have to say that the exchange of "It'll be like the OK Corral!" and "Almost everyone died there" does seem like pretty good banter. The brash guy who's got courage but perhaps not knowledge contrasting with the more cynical, in-the-know one.
Shame we didn't get more of that.
Yeah for real, I let it play because I enjoyed it and wish we got more of that back and forth
"It turns out I need crime to justify my existence fighting it." You have uncovered the truth of police militarization and "The War on Drugs", and not realized it.
Stupid dog whistle response
Bruh
@@k.constantinebootlicker take
Will save this video for tomorrow morning, i'll make some coffee to go along! Just wanted to say that I really enjoy your content, they way you make these video and write the script for the review(or essay? Or just some thoughts put together? I don't know how to call it, your videos are to me this kind of hybrid between review, walkthrough and analysis. Its a nice a mix) on whatever videogame you're making a video about. I also really enjoy watching the game in action, its always so nice and comfy to watch gameplays of janky and not well know games. Keep it up and have a nice new year!
While they're all arbitrary terms I guess I just go with video tour guide. It's me reflecting on what I thought about going through a game
in the war on drugs the drugs fight back
the drugs win
You know, I left the credits going to read the comments and your Jelly Joe bit at the very end spooked the shit out of me. Great video as always! POP POP POP--
8:30 ooh wow! you rarely see health-packs work in cutscenes like in gameplay! One shot and is at full hp once more!
This was a weird trip of game. I'm totally sharing this with my friends cause its just so surreal. Thanks for another hour of fun Snake as a christmas gift, you and Ross Scott do god's work.
Spoiler warning for an old movie
The secret of liquid soul sounds like it might be inspired by a 1973 movie called Soylent Green (Which takes place in 2022 btw) in which a detective discovers that Soylent green, a wafer that was produced to feed people during a time of complete lack of resources, is made of pulverized remains of corpses. Upon discovering the secret, the detective yells "Soylent green is people!". The scene with Marcus reminded that narrative of the movie to a certain degree though I can't say I'm certain that it's an inspired scene or a coincidentally similar plot twist.
the UI and gameplay mechanics appear to have many parts which are identical to those found in double action: boogaloo and it's making me feel like i'm in a berenstein/berenstain universe situation
You have unlocked hidden sleeper memories deep in the back of my mind. I rented this game for a weekend from a west coast video as a kid and i had completely forgotten, I got to the point where you're a beatcop and just murdered civilians and thugs for hours. I never got any farther in the game than that.
Amazing video essay on this tacky gem from the 2000's. I'm happy you featured clips of True Crime and it would be awesome if you could do a review on True Crime: Streets of LA. That game is a treasure trove of jank and hilariously stupid nonsense, but it is very fun and Nick Kang could make for a interesting case study on how a cop should never act.
Funny thing, I made a video on it years ago, it's really bad and I really ought to revisit it someday
I remember us renting the game when I was in middle school, and even 7th grade me thought it was cheap...
Fun fact: This game was made by the same devs as the first State Of Emergency; that's why the hand-to-hand combat is so simple and to the point.
still my favourite Playing: video because the final chapter opens with "Shut up. That ending fucking sucked."
The fact that the writers came up with an acronym for the word narc is genius.
the fucking reverbed POP POP POP
killed me
The TH-cam "Browse Game" tag thinking this game is Grand Theft Auto -- the 1997 one, for the PSX, from the topdown perspective -- is slaying me every second I see it.
Upon further consideration, I gotta say, the "fire tear gas into a building and merc people trying to escape it" is darkly hilarious; Marcus has been on the stupidly-named-but-only-just anti-drug task force for like a day, and is already Waco'ing dance clubs. On foreign soil, no less! Our ATF couldn't fuck up that hard, that quickly, if they tried -- AND THEY HAVE!
What a great belated Christmas present, also I love how youtube doesn't even recognize the game in the description so it lists the original GTA instead. Absolute poetry. Great video as always man!
Liquid Soul icon is likely an ampule, not a bottle. If there WAS a line that shouldn't have been crossed in there, someone's probably snorted it.
"better known as" will never not make me giggle
I love it when you cover older and less heard of games like this one. Great video as always.
Dude thanks for this whole video. It brings back so much memories of me and my cousin fucking around and completing this game back in middle school. We never understood the game but it was so much fun.
Thanks for the belated Christmad gift! Love your work as always.
I have to remind myself constantly when looking at NARC PS2, that yes it does exist, and yes it is banking on brand recognition from an arcade game about _rocket-launching SWAT officers._
35:35 the comedic timing of the explosion and the slowmo call afterwards are hysterical, absolute gold
I smoke 2 joints before I smoke 2 joints, and then I smoke 2 more. Smooooke 2 joints.
Lost my shit when you cut off mid “at the docks, better known as the doc-“ 10/10 vid again homeboy
I listen to your videos on repeat when doing things because your voice is very calming
Same
Say what you will, any game with Pusherman and Golden Brown on the soundtrack is doing something right. Even if tonally they make no sense in an action game like this.
ngl, jack's bad trip fmv was hella ahead of its time - feels like a sfm horror short
This game, like true crime, totally *could* have been cool, fun games though, and the result is fun in its own way to sift through. I mean, how can you forget killing nearly a thousand men over the main story events, only to begin fighting vampires and dragons in the bad storyline of true crime:streets of LA, to suddenly get your ass handed to you by a skinny, old, mystic chinese immagrant who appears to maybe also be immortal. OR literally becoming a samurai cop in NY and fighting people with a wooden katana then stepping into your bulletproof escalade to abuse your sirens and make everyone move out of your way as you speed down to the next objective was fucking FUN but as soon as you have to watch another cutscene or listen to any dialogue or do anything that isnt fighting, shooting or driving the game is a slog. Those are the areas gta always excelled at and it helped glue things together so gta san andreas still feels better to play than true crime even if technically true crime is miles ahead in terms of shooting being way more fluid, clearer audio, hand to hand fighting having its own system, and fully branching story, slo-mo mechanics, and even a morality system.
Cool, a new video about an interesting game. Thanks for this holiday present!
This channel is awesome. I’m not big on games but the content here is so interesting and unique that I end up watching/listening to hour long videos of games I’ve never heard of and will never play lol 👍🏾
I wasnt expecting to see a clip from the Cryme Time playthrough of Fight for New York in a Tehsnakerer video.
Great job, now I'm depressed because I remember the good old days of the Best Friends Zaibatsu...
A great loss
I absolutely have to see the footage from you playing this with your mates, you guys sound like you're having a blast with this weird anomaly of a game
This channel is criminally underrated
I'm so sorry for saying that
Driv3r, NARC, Reservoir Dogs, Crime Boss Rockay City...
It feels like whenever Michael Madsen is involved in a game shit gets weird fast.
Always a pleasure to see Tehsnakerer play some jank
My cousin bought this PS2 which came with an LOAD of bootleg CDs in like 2007, and NARC was one of the gems in it. I didn't play it too much but running around the streets for a bit burned Curtis Mayfield's Pusherman in my brain, which is a good thing I'm grateful for this game doing.
Jack Forzenski looks like a discount Travis Touchdown.
holy shit so soon? thanks i find great pleasure knowing this is being download into my personal computer using my internet connection
Well, I didn't see the sad mech coming. POP POP POP
20:20: Isn't it weird that Tehsnakerer talked about pointless morality systems, and two of the three examples were from games that had a point to make with them? _Bioshock_ giving you short-term rewards for selfish behavior but better long-term ones for kindness was a direct refutation of the philosophy of -Andrew Ryan- Ayn Rand, which is kinda the thesis of the whole game; meanwhile, Shepherd's Renegade and Paragon options in _Mass Effect_ were supposed to represent whether _humanity as a whole_ would put its own needs above those of other races or work with them to build a better galaxy. They didn't have a lot of _mechanical_ depth, but there was _substance_ there.
AFAIK, there wasn't anything like that in _Infamous,_ the other game showed there. And most games with morality systems were a lot closer to that than they were to _Bioshock_ or _Mass Effect,_ adding morality systems not because it suited the story being told but because it was a way to add Player Choice(TM) without having to construct much extra content.
As much as I'd like to think Bioshock's morality system is a stroke of thematic genius, the reality is that its framed so utterly terribly that it never gives you any sort of appreciable choice. "DO YOU MURDER CHILD" is not a riveting moral dilemma. "DO YOU MURDER CHILD FOR VERY MINOR INCREASED REWARD" is not more convincing because it only takes saving a few Little Sisters before you get the bigger, better reward. If they game made you wait until 75% of the way through for the good morality reward, maybe they'd have something there, but that's not really the case. Furthermore, the game's too easy for a bit of extra ADAM in the moment to be that enticing.
The other thing is that giving the player more ADAM for playing the default, normal, halfway decent human being I think UNDERMINES the thematic elements. It places the reward as something material, and considering Ayn Rand/Andrew Ryan placed too much important on material things, it messes with the message that should be told. The real long-term reward is what the story gives you - Jack gets a family that loves him and that he gets to see grow up and succeed, and who at his side when he finally dies. *That* is much more thematically appropriate.
@@innoclarke7435 Did you read my post? Bioshock never tries to act like both options are equally valid. There is one that it wants you to take. Doing bad things for short-term profit is bad, which is reflected in both the Little Sisters and in the fall of Rapture, which happened because a bunch of businessmen pursued their self-interest to the detriment of the community they lived in.
@@timothymclean I sure did. Rather, I should ask if you read mine.
Bioshock does, in fact, try to portray both options as equally valid. The game at no point indicates that going the good route will be beneficial to you. Indeed, you end up getting 320 more ADAM harvesting every Little Sister than by saving them. Saving them only gives you a few tonics which *sound* really useful, but aren't that handy in practice ,and the Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid. The rest of the rewards are resources like ammo and hypos that you almost certainly aren't struggling to keep stocked to begin with because the game's economy is deeply skewed in your favour.
I love Bioshock 1, but its morality system simply fails. Bioshock 2 actually does" better" in this regard, reducing the evil path's ADAM bonus to just 90 more than rescuing all of the Little Sisters. Further, since Bioshock 2's difficulty is a lot better tuned to actually challenge you, the good reward of having the Sisters harvest faster helps you keep more of your resources. In Bioshock 1, you straight up don't even have to think about resources, you'll just end up maxing out everything without trying. Bioshock 2 tried to force you to use them, making a reward allowing you to save those resources have more weight.
Mechanically, neither game's morality system really matters terribly much at all in active decision making. In this way, they're both failures. Using the mechanics to counter the very ideas that Rapture was built upon, Bioshock 2 improves. It's just that simple. The only reason Bioshock 1 doesn't give you even more reward for harvesting the Little Sisters is because someone at 2K or Irrational didn't have the balls to do so. Funny thing is, though, is that even it rewarded you more for being evil, it would've still been able to excoriate Jack in the ending cutscenes, while also having it be interesting for Jack to achieve a lot of material success through cold, selfish materialism, like Ryan did. As it is, the way the rewards are calculated and the game is balanced don't contribute to assertively making *any* statement. A man chooses, but it doesn't give you enough to the system to make the choice have any weight.
@@innoclarke7435 So let's see if I understand your argument correctly. Bioshock portrays the choices as equivalent because it doesn't explicitly say "Saving the little girl is the right choice." Having the good choice be both the optimal choice and the moral one is therefore a failure to live up to your standards of moral choices, and not a way of Bioshock treating one choice as the right choice.
From this, I gather that you think choices in games need to either have the consequences spelled out clearly (ie, "Saving the Little Sisters gives more ADAM in the long run") or make them balanced in some way. I can see that making sense from a purely mechanical standpoint; through that lens, a choice which hurts the player without them being able to predict it would be bad.
And you know what? *My initial comment noted that the Little Sister choices in Bioshock were weak from a mechanical standpoint!* I agree! But, I think the choice system serves another purpose, one which is impeded by the player knowing with full certainty that saving the Sisters is beneficial in the long run.
Analyzing the Little Sisters as a purely mechanical system is kinda like analyzing Resident Evil 1 as a pure action game. The clunky controls and limited camera angles detract from RE1 as a third-person shooter. But those elements are crucial components of the game's horror! Complaining about RE1's crappy combat system would be missing the point! The same is true of analyzing a (good) moral choice system the way you'd analyze a character upgrade system.