Genesis Rising on Steam - store.steampowered.com/app/3230/Genesis_Rising/ I'm glad to see a lot of people thought they imagined this game. It's a lot to take in.
I actually bought this when it was newish, or more accurately my dad bought it for me on one of our occasional gamestop visits where I looked at the back of boxes for 15 minutes until deciding which game I was gonna play for the next month or two. I don't think I made it past two missions before going back to play mechwarrior.
@@infelsphere7526 oh man, you've just made me remember how my dad and I would go to a game store every few months and pick up one game on sale. That's how I found Halo 3 when I was 6, and me and my dad played it a lot. Nowadays, he and I mostly play Arma and racing games, but we still occasionally play games like Halo.
Thank you for the coverage of our first video game :) It's been a while since someone mentioned Genesis Rising :) If we can answer any questions regarding the game you might have, please let us know :)
Hi, @MandaloreGaming, I'm one of the Genesis Rising's developers. Thank you for doing this excellent and humorous review - surprised that you dug it out after all this time, I enjoyed watching it very much, and considering how flawed the game was, you were actually very kind :) None of us at Metamorf had any previous professional experience whatsoever at the beginning of the production - a few of us did some experimental game development as a hobby, but nothing nearly close to this scale, so it was a madness to start it with such a small team, and a miracle that it actually came out. The production took many years because we were also building the engine from scratch, together with all the tools for world-editing and directing in-game real-time interactive sequences (which was bleeding-edge tech for that time and wasn't used at all, the publisher decided for pre-rendered cutscenes), with its own visual scripting language embedded, designed specifically for directing cinematic scenes that vary depending on information from simulation and vice versa. The idea was to be able to see the fleet you designed through the main ship's window during the dialogues, it was fully implemented and cut out from the final game in favour of video-clips. The multiplayer code supported hundreds of entities in the scene over the very slow modems of that time, which most of the games in that era didn't have. Multiplayer mode was actually the main focus of development, and the best part of the game, inspired very much by Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game - it was full 3D at the begining, with all the problems with orientation that being in zero-gravity brings, so it was "nailed" to a 2D plane later in development; it even had realistic physical movement of spaceships (accelerated half of the way and then thrusted in the other direction to stop at a designated point), but that made spatial distances and all strategies around them totally meaningless, so we threw that out too. The multiplayer idea never took off with the publisher as it required additional investment for server maintenance etc, but it was actually fun to play in LAN, not sure if it's possible with the released version. We did most of that work (engine, the world-editor and the game) with 4 (in letters: four) developers, and 6-8 artists, depending on the moment. The budget was actually miserable, until in the last year the publisher jumped in, doubled the team and "spiced up" the production value with cinematics. I still cringe at those Warhammer-like armors and the ship interiors with blinking lights, because originally everything was organic, like in the Cruciform comic book - from the elegant suits with veins growing on human bodies, to command room that looked like a crosover between a whale's stomach and a cathedral. The style of characters in the initial version was also much more cartoony and could be described as "Disney meets David Cronenberg in H.R. Giger's living room", but all of that was dropped by publisher as it was considered "too East-European", and replaced with something they thought Warhammer or H.A.L.O. audience would like more. Flawed as it was, this project was started in the moment when the game industry didn't exist AT ALL in our freshly bombed country, exausted by a decade of wars. It has demonstrated that even in those circumstances, it is not impossible to start and finish (albeit with sticks and ropes) a fully fledged "almost AAA" game, and has inspired many others to get into the industry, which is today very healthy and growing in Serbia. Thank you once again for the review, it is much appreciated.
That's awesome to hear that the ambitions had been so much higher, and that the 3D space Homeworld influence still came through despite all the cutbacks that had to be done due to the rough development conditions. Thanks for all your hard work. Despite how unstable it was it still stuck with me all these years later and a game worth remembering is pretty special.
It would be great if you guys could get the band back together and remake this game with visuals on the level of Scorn and everything else as you envisioned it. Maybe some rewrites of the story a bit. Just imagine the henta-I mean fan content people will make!
Honestly, knowing the story behind the game makes the achievement of building a game like this extremely impressive, and makes its flaws understandable. It's like finishing your work on your first big school project while the building is on fire. Sure, it's got flaws, but considering what you were dealing with at the time, those flaws are forgivable. The project had some really awesome ideas in it too that deserve more expansion.
May I inquire if you plan to create a similar game as this? It may not be perfect but certainly had a lot of fun, Im hoping that maybe a retelling with a more serious tone :v, perhaps more bio-ships the size of titanic proportions? I mean nothing speaks more terrifying as a massive bio-ship heading to your fleet
Hearing "the last unexplored galaxy" is such a grand fucking statement if you understand anything about the sheer unhumanly absurd scale of the universe and it's delivered with all the gravitas of a dude telling you your coffee is ready.
@@discipleofdagon8195 nah, whats more terrifying is when our universe dies its completely possible another big bang might happen meaning that we may not have been the first. Assuming the void of space is truly infinite there could be an unimaginable number of previous universes that ran their course and burned out. If you think about it that way our existence is infinitesimally small.
@Disciple of Dagon well, considering space-time "curves", wouldn't it be less an "edge" and more of a "loop"? Like if you travel in a straight line through the universe you'll eventually end up where you started(not counting any movement your starting point might have made itself, but you get what I mean)
Humanity going on a universe-wide genocidal campaign to search for some mythical item just to rewind time to make an even stronger human empire is 100% A+ human writing. The aliens that wrote this script knew what they were doing!
Hello! My name is Average Human Writer! We would like to invite you to our test ch-... I mean, Human Writer Con that's being held at your local flying saucer. Please arrive alone. Yours truly, Someone who's totally not going to dissect you, Average H.W.
I honestly love the idea of "All of the universe exists to annoy one guy because God thinks it's funny to mess with the first being he ever made". It makes God look like he's one of those Roller Coaster Tycoon players who build Mister Bones' Wild Ride and just sit there, watching it, giggling to himself the entire time.
@@Marcara081 I loved the backstory and lore of that game and wish it got a follow-up. Heck, I'd settle for a visual novel as long as the setting and characters remained that creative.
I love how essentially the "conspiracy" of the government already controlling the universe is to do the exact same thing but even better this time They literally want to do New Game+. It's brilliant
This whole Plot and Setting is if you read all the Serbian Balkan memes and made that the entire plot. Serbia was so Powerful they Rule the Universe, Serbia is so Oppressed they are made strong by God who is Serbian, Serbia Make Aliens their servants but Serbia is Kind so they let them live but Aliens betray Serbia, Serbia Betray Serbia so Serbia can be stronger, Serbia is Forever.🇸🇰
In like, a Bioware RPG or something, the ending final battle being yourself versus the yourself-who-picked-the-other-endings is actually pretty fun idea for a final battle.
@@Shenaldrac "Now I must fight myself after defeating Lucifer in the hidden ending that requires jumping through several hoops that are unknowable unless you replay the game a few times or Google it! Truly, my ideals must be at the forefront of this new world, and subscribe to the best ideology of the only 3 that exist within this world!" Also after you beat yourself an entirely new super hidden Boss appears on the next playthrough, it's you, but with all the most overpowered skills to use against the MC, like Pierce and the ridiculous physical skills like Friekugal you unlock later on haha.
This setting is insane. The WHOLE universe being explored gave me pause but calling someone on the phone actually summoning a clone of them made me take a break.
I can believe it, no space faring civilisation would ever stick to just one single galaxy. The only reason we don't see multi galaxy civilisations in sci fi all that much is because the milky way alone is big enough to carry an entire setting as it's own self contained universe even if most video game and tv show writers have such a shitty grasp on sense of scale they rarely understand that (see mass effect and the whole revelation that humanity for some reason had to evacuate the milky way whole sale rather than just hide out in an uncharted region for 1000's of human years and strike back later with ships that don't have peashooters for a main gun this time)
They do all this insane worldbuilding, but then the characters complain about certain parts of space *being cold.* It's like they fired everyone who knew what they were doing halfway through development.
@@Rick586 as if that wouldn't be possible. We researched only vacum close to our planet. For all we know, it could go lowere than -100000 C in other regions of the universe.
Tbh the opening father-son bonding time actually does fit the nightmarish setting, but it lacks one critical element: The perspective of the outsider. I’m reminded of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that features Picard being tortured by the Cardassians. At one point the torturer is sitting in the interrogation cell with his daughter on his knee, doting on her as he tortures Picard. Picard asks him how he could allow a child to witness such horror, at which point the torturer is genuinely confused, and asks him why, given that his daughter has been taught that enemies of the Cardassian state deserve their fate. This scene is missing its Picard-analogue. To Iconah and his father, this *genuinely is* a fun, super-cool outing between father and son. A genuine heartfelt bit of bonding. To an outsider, it is a father teaching his son how to best order a giant slave-beast to kill. But without the outsider, that part is de-emphasized. We only experience it through the eyes of the characters present.
I disagree. The player themselves is already such an outsider. Putting a character in there just to fill that role would feel artificial. Star Trek does it that way for the obvious reason that Picard is already the protagonist of the show before such a scene was ever imagined so naturally we just keep following his perspective. But generally putting an outsider into your world just so that the audience can discover the world along with the character is considered a cheap escape from trying to describe the world in an organic way by just letting the audience witness it. In a way it's a "tell instead of show" situation where instead of being shown the world you get told about it by this outsider character. Just think, what is are your first thoughts whenever you hear of another new isekai show? Sure, there are gems among those too, but usually that genre label alone is enough to expect it to most probably be some kind of trash.
@@HanakoSeishin I think there’s some miscommunication here, I don’t mean a *setting* outsider, I mean a *cultural* outsider. Picard and the Cardassians occupy the same setting, but Picard is an outsider to Cardassian culture. Such a thing could be accomplished by hearing random comms chatter from destroyed ships as their crews panicked. However, I must acknowledge @StriderXYZ’s comment that the outright whiplash of the scene serves as its own dramatic highlight. Tonal dissonance is an under-utilized narrative tool, and can often stand on its own merits.
"So we don't get the more sentimental bits of H. R. Geiger's Eragon." Mandy why have you cursed me with such an amazing concept that I will never be able to experience? A concept like that sounds so fucking amazing yet I know it cannot exist.
Same. I never forgot seeing it in store just once, and finally websearched it a decade later. Oh, what a disappointment that it wasn't an obscure masterpiece...
Fun facts about the Lapis: 1. Their biggest ships are actually carved PLANETS. 2. You can steal their builder ships and build your own Lapis. 3. Lapis means "Stone" in Latin.
@@Bloodlyshiva It depends on the level in which you capture them. As the player-made Lapis use the same genes as the NPC Lapis from their respective levels, Early on, they're very weak, but they are quite strong if you can nab a builder in the endgame. It's fun to petrify enemies and many levels have asteroids in them.
The concept of humanity riding biological eldritch space ships and it comes across as humanity being more alien than the aliens in the galaxy. Not so much with their story, however. It's rather out there, exactly.
I kind of really like how casual some elements of this are. Like...the universe is conquered, humanity drives around nightmare-ships but people still get blasted on alcohol and get horny about boobs. There's something kind of striking about the fact these people are still fundamentally human. And man, so much stuff in this game needs another swing taken at it. There are SO many cool ideas here.
they're making clones of people for teleconferencing and somehow they haven't found a way to just spawn them in disconnected from the original like a dirty holodeck (or for more practical purposes, turning some trusted guy into your own Duncan Idaho), so I'm disputing their humanity part
I haven't read the rest of the Dune series yet do they ever get the idea to just clone Duncan enough times to make an army EDIT: I mean Gholagize or whatever the term is
I'm still struggling to parse how the gorgeous yet nightmarish biomechanical ship designs are part of the same game where the cutscenes look like id Software's version of Xavier Renegade Angel.
The idea of the final boss of a video game with multiple endings being the you's who chose the other endings is actually kind of dope. I can maybe imagine this working in a fully-fledged RPG? Maybe the other you's could have different classes, abilities, and personalities than your current character to give you a taste of different playstyles to incentivize you to replay it. They could even allude to other events you never saw because of the choices you made on your current playthrough.
You have a have a big brawl with multiple variations of your character. Basically have 1 version that's your mirror match, and then a bunch of other versions that are varying degrees different, from different variations of your class, to different classes different builds for that class. Maybe even nice little minor details based on character creation stuff. Depends on whether this going to a tough fight against yourself or a more a comedic episode where you have a level that is filled with nothing but different versions of the player character.
@@spookmeyer970 There's a game for that, also an RTS, called Achron. It's about 3 races, each with their own time travel mechanics, fighting each other. It's fantastic. In the end (spoiler: due to time travel shennigans, your commander AI character ends up stuck in a repeating cycle, and turns out to be the tech that all 3 races use for coordinating time travel)
I was going to mention the Dark Souls 1 cut content that toyed with this idea. But since someone else brought it up I can add that the final boss of Dark Souls 3, Soul of Cinder, does technically do the "version of the player who chose different builds" concept. There, the idea is that your character from the 1st game is manifested alongside every other person who linked the flame (IE went for the "canon" ending). So the boss puts in mind all the different builds your character would have gone for and even mixes them up when he switches between builds. The boss can have a straight sword build with a passive sorcery spell active or a spear build with a pyromancy damage buff.
@@8Kazuja8 nah, just like divergent timelines meeting up or like some kind closed timeloop fuckery. Doesn't have to get too bad to still have fun with it
It could even be a good concept for a sequel. Yeah, it could mean a third of the game would be unplayable in a single playthrough, but it's still an interesting idea.
I stumbled and my knees went weak. I gripped the side of the bus shelter I was standing beside for support. Genesis Rising. The title of the video opened a cellar of memories. Forgotten for decades, ones of frustrating missions and never being sure what's going on with anything I was doing. They flooded back into me like the memories of a long dead race bestowing arcane knowledge upon a hapless explorer. But these were not lost antediluvian technological blueprints, no forgotten incantations, no forbidden spells of deathless gods. These were the memories of Genesis Rising, and I am now poorer for remembering. Good video!
Were I to hazard a guess, I would say that most Slavs live in countries that are not the most pleasant to live in (both in terms of economy and climate), we had at least 1 destructive war or oppressive regime in the living memory of large part of population, the cultural memory is an all-over-the-place stew of numerous traditions from pagan age, the East-West mixture brewed through Late Medieval to Industrial, distinct Romantic flavour of the above and whatever garbled scraps of Western development snuck their way behind the Iron Curtain usually way past the expiration date in the USA: we're just all a little mad and it's just how we deal with it. Some make bizarre masterworks of science-fantasy, some do extreme parkour, some go into politics... It's mostly a joke, but really, if there's something unique about Slavs is casual acceptance of how mad and unfair life can be. I know, I'm Polish. Tounge-in-cheek complaining is a national pasttime.
Many of them might turn out as crap, but it's still inspiring for new sci-fi writers to just not care what people might think and go wild with crazy ideas.
Slavs are mostly immune to the tropes of Western fantasy and science fiction due to having spent almost a century without access to fantasy at all and only a small trickle of state-approved Western science fiction. This gives people a fresh perspective.
@@LazyBuddyBan yes. In the last update Hakita included level 5-S. I don't want to spoil anything since it's recent, but I think if you either play said level or read the lore on the Wiki, you should easily get the reference. Either that, or watch GluD3 last videos. Fair warning, it's a LSD journey :P.
This game sounds like the definition of “it has potential” Cool bioships, human empire, mutations and supernatural/spiritual themes. If they rebooted this IP today i bet it could be amazing
You would think that the spiritual would clash against transhumanism. It would be better to focus as only two main factions to start off so religion vs Geiger?
From experience with games and media like this, "it has potential" often ends up being meaningless, if the makers fail to build on it. Like, its great how such an insane setting can make you think about the world and possibilies, but thats your head doing the work, not the game. The game took cool themes and meshed them together, and mostly mostly failed to deliver, except in some of the visuals and 10% of the soundtrack. Probably better to leave the creative heads to use and execute on their own, cool concepts, rather than have them try to fix the IP. And sometimes executing a generic idea well can be worth more than a bad unique game. IMO thats why we remember Halo 1-3, and not Genesis Rising. The orinal Halo trilogie is really generic in so many ways, with colorful 80s aliens and the most basic military scifi. But it managed to create cool gameplay and a fun setting. If anything, Halo under 343 Industries became a bit more crazy, but also much worse executed.
@@ForceshildLP transhumanism is satanic because God wants His creation to take care of themself. Satan wants His creation to harm themselves Keep that in mind if you ever get pressured into accepting it, if it ever comes to reality.
Agreed, I loved the living ships in Farcscape and I love the idea here. Living ships will always be such a cool and unique idea, I wish more things used that idea and ran with it. Biotechnology, living technology, things that should be inorganic but being alive has always been such a weird, eerie and cool idea.
Lexx alois one, and has that weirdness of a living ship, its also tboth very campy, very 2000 and weird and great. And doesnt roin hobbs have a living ship trilogy. its fantasy, but still.
I think with how popular Evangelion was (and still is) makes living technology not all that new in media, it's also a high bar most of the time Is done the story gets very existentialist.
Living ships are an exceptionally stupid idea. There’s nothing a flying meatball could do that a machine could not do better. And a machine won’t be stopped by a random case if the flu.
"But Mellagio was betrayed." "Betrayed? Betrayed by whom?" "God." "What?" I've barely started watching, and yet immediately this is a fucking awesome dialogue. Edit: Wow the dialogue in general is, uh...
I had to watch clips from Xavier: Renegade Angel as a mind-cleanse after listening to Lord Mandalore explain this game's plot, which is *really* saying something.
The scene of the three protagonists bickering with each other immediately reminded me of Xavier saying "You're the sad figment of my twisted psyche's tragic dividend" to his doppleganger.
When it was revealed that all life in the universe was created just to spite Gothmog's dyson sphere, and his big revenge plot was foiled by God jacking the universe up 10^10000% in MS-Paint, I swear I started howling with laughter.
you know, the humans in this game somewhat remind me of the Greneer (or how it's spelled ) from Warframe. From what I can remember at least of the old warframe lore, Greneers are humans that started using cloning and bio tech to the point where they barely function without lifesupport etc and their ships and armour has this very Geiger esque feel to them with odd shapes and tendens.
Orokin structures are packed with meat; presumably living, presumably edible. You can see it being harvested in Cetus. Somehow I got that vibe from the biotech in this game; and the whole hyper advanced race thing too.
there's also the infestation, a plague that fuses its biological elements to technology. the jordas golem very much fits the visual of a fleshy, living ship after being taken over by it.
@@watariovids1645 Pretty much, with an undercurrent of the Imperium of Man - they hate everything and everyone that isn't born of their clonelines and want to exterminate, enslave, or one and then the other to all other life. (Their archrivals, the Corpus, are a shinier, more Mac version of the Adeptus Mechanicus.)
Holy shit this has got to be the first time in my life someone has acknowledged the Leviathan series. It has got to be one of my favorite fictional universes ever and I am both surprised and over the moon that it is still being talked about.
@@TheNewdawn1st This isn't really the same, but there's a mod for Hearts of Iron IV called Pax Britannica. It's basically an alternate-history WWII, and instead of tanks you use mechs and biological aberrations. Even the barbed wire is alive and angry. It's about the closest thing I can think to a playable version of Leviathan.
I was stunned too. The Leviathan series was one of those books that I read when I was younger and have yet to hear anyone else bring them up until today
The whole thing with a God's original plan for creation being just this one dude in a much smaller universe is so funny to me. Almost a.... Divine Comedy? (Ultrakill references were great lmao) The part where Mandy expanded an image of space in photoshop while the guy was explaining it cracked me up.
@@jorgenjorgensen2739 There's some definite overtones of certain Abrahamic myths and comedies inherent to that about the nature of God and the devil. But of course, making an entire universe just to prove a point and spite the Satan is almost too human a thing to do to make it believably the plan of God. That definitely gives any type of character or entity doing it far too recognizably human a spiritual visage and personality. As opposed to what the actual realities is, that God is fundamentally alien thinking and unknowable. Because nothing that exists outside time and space and therefore is not even bound to a thing like mortality or time constraints is going to have fundamentally blue/orange thinking and morality. I think the dumber a person is the more they conflate God the supreme being with basically just being an idealized version of their father, fundamentally lacking the kind of intellectual maturity and emotional develop to synthesize the childish idea of "parent is perfect and all powerful" with the juvenile idea of "my parent has flaws and is awful." It has been my experience that terribly few religious people in this world believe in God, or in the hereafter. They likewise seem to think they get a second body or some complete lies like that. When you die your body rots and you are gone as the person, the thing that is going to be left over, spirit, has no need for food or drink. So the Christian and Muslim idea of heaven being a place with flowing streams is a complete lie. It would be more akin to a state of being. Thus, there's few people who have ever believed in God or afterlife. Most of them are firmly rooted to this world and materialism, and simply believe in sating their carnal desires and worshiping their father and an idealized, romantcized notion of childhood. Right wingers tend to do this a lot. Completely stunted maturity. Truly, narrow is the way and few that have ever found it, and instead are perishing in their errors.
My word, the setting without the cutscenes is one of the most genuinely horrifying future sci-fi settings I’ve experienced. The ship designs are so inspired. I hope someone does pick this setting up one day and does the potential justice.
The idea that these ships are living beings capable of adapting their bodies for warfare adds a little bit to the horror,especially with all the blood sucking and the explosions…and the fact that zoom calls in this universe create a clone of the person you’re talking to God,biopunk is such a good genre for body horror,and horror in general
@@StyryderX I mean, obviously. It's just always regrettable when things are changed for the worse to fit trends. While they provided funding, and publishing, they also had a not insignificant portion of the game redone to their own taste. Trade offs I suppose.
Developed by a studio from Belgrade! I remember reading a review on it in a game magazine around 2007. A very vivid memory. The feeling of surprise at seeing screenshots of a game developed so close to home, sharing pages right there with The Burning Crusade made me very proud. And now its on your channel!!
@@legio1942 I remember seeing it in Svet Kompjutera. They had regular coverage and interviews with developers before the release as well. I might have that SK issue and the game disc stashed somewhere.
This is genuinely such an interesting idea. Most sci-fi settings tend to make humans the runt of the universe. How amazing of an RPG setting would this concept make? A mashup of (oldschool) Spelljammer and Genesis Rising would totally rock.
I always liked it when humanity is treated as if nothing else a proper player cause let's be real we are a vicious race even when compared to our planets wildlife
of all the things I expected to hear in this story. "Magio is beefing with god because god made life to annoy him" was not on that list, and I am fucking dying from that statement.
I remember when this game came out! It was a big deal then for all of us Serbian gamers. A proper game, released locally. With global release. All of the game publications were full of them. I think I still have my issue of Svet Kompjutera (World of computers) with the interview and the game. Thanks for the nostalgia trip man!
The Xavier: Renegade Angel theme playing during that argument cutscene makes this entire video come together. It is just that cherry on top that final touch that made me completely lose it.
I just had a seizure and as soon as I was alone I went and searched up your channel because of how comforting your videos are to me even while I’m alone in this hospital room, just wanted to say thanks honestly
This was the first game that made me feel true buyers remorse. The game was scuffed from the start but it was such a fun concept and I could never truly hate it.
As someone who wants to make a space RTS involving a bio-horror bad guy, this was an extremely welcome review. Lot of things to keep an eye out for gameplay wise so you don't have the same issues when trying to min-max the Evon Swarm's Carrier-Battleship hybrids and Heavy Weapons cruisers without getting flank-spanked by bird dudes with wormhole assisted siege cannons.
I keep wishing for bioships in stellaris and these organic ships are the perfect design for them. Especially for the idea of human empire that enslaves and wipes out aliens after repeated attempts by them to do the same thing.
Honestly with the story THIS wild, I'm kind of shocked that the Rock didn't have involved bang scenes with both the Alien Ice Queen AND the council member. The huge tiddy scene was perfect for the ripshit tone of this game, and the ending fight between 3 versions of yourself is honestly a perfect idea with just, terrible execution. I've never seen the show, but part of this makes me think of LEXX, which was also a living ship with it's own goals and desires separate from it's crew.
@@Finarvas When you think about it, having a living ship with desires would be spooky enough on it's own, like stories with AI. Like you could have a moment like "The ship wants to mate" and have it sound funny, right until you start wondering the logistics of what that could possibly mean, or for you as a crew
@@girthquake1413 Hope you're in the male ship, otherwise get ready to act as the prophylactic. Also because you've scarred me, I return the favour by just blatantly stating it; preggo shippo.
glad someone else mentioned Lexx, really does seem like it was an influence. The absurdly huge universe spanning scope, the living ships from an evil theocratic human empire, cosmic metaphysical struggles, the combination of grim dark tone and sex comedy farce, it's all there.
They XRA plot twist sent me into complete madness . Thank you Mandalore Also I thought I was the only person to appreciate the leviathan books kieth thompson has been an inspiration for me since I was a young teen.
Man, I had always imagined a sort of biopunk story where humanity were like the zerg or the tyranids, though in my mind it was more of an underdog story how those who had nothing managed to use biological tech to grow and become stronger.
I've thought of that too, only the reverse where they aren't the underdog and instead are a universe sized horror that is spreading to other universes, like the tyranid great devourer, but big enough to eat whole universes.
No joke, these older games need help running well, and Mandalore detailing what he did to get them running, as well as the how and why, is VERY helpful.
Full honesty: I really miss the gormless honesty and passion of old school voice over. The job was more fun back then, and for all its flaws, the charm is timeless. Another fantastic episode, Mandalore, as always. Thank ya kindly. :)
@@RootVegetabIe Interesting note: Gothic's protagonist was Eng dubbed by Bradley Lavelle, who was also the Eng dub for Demon City Shinjuku. It was a cozy industry back then.
You know, I always wondered what a Warhammer 40K movie would look like if David Cronenberg directed it and now I have a pretty good idea thanks to this review.
The biotechnology for this reminds me a lot of the sequel/reboot of 90s Image superhero comic Prophet that ran in the 2010s. A far-future human empire of multiple dynasties conquers the galaxy, using an army of genetically adaptive clones of the original John Prophet. Even some of the ships and vehicles were organic, made from John's genetic material.
Safira is some freakish biomechanical phallic monster that is pitch black and somehow in-between horrifying and intriguing. Eragon ends up in a weirdly sexual position whenever he tries to ride her... Also lot's of leather.
There is a comic currently being written with a similar setting called Humanity Lost by Callum Stephen Diggle were the human are the bad guys but have been mutated and fly in fleshy ships and is has some of the most original alien designs I have ever seen
When a new Mandalore video pops up and almost half the runtime is dedicated to the Story, you know you're in for a good time. Edit: Giant blue alien tiddies... of course, what else?
Mandy buddy, thanks for always being consistent when it comes to your content. I can always know its going to be well recorded and edited. #1 fav channel and it's not even close.
i love this so much. bizzare scifi is my favourite thing in the entire world and this one is incredible. might have to suffer through playing this game to experience this
@@DM-mi4je It's decent by Scott Westerfield. He's written a number of other books as well most notably Uglies. The appeal of the story is watching World War I play out with a few changes and examining the different biological weapons thrown together. The author also has a section at the end of each book where he explains which elements he took from real history
I really appreciate MandaloreGaming he puts out these entertaining videos without going too crazy with the edits like Seeth or Maxor. Also nice use of XRA music.
MandaloreGaming, I found your channel about two weeks ago and I’ve binged all your videos since then. Really awesome work, man. Thanks for the content!
29:07 "You're the sad figment of my twisted psyche's tragic dividend. You're the un-me, I'm the real me. You wanna be, me?" "Kiddo, I was the real me when you were still in my short-pants." "Hate to break it to ya, but I wore them first. Me bequeathed thee, the psychopathological hand-you-down." "So *you're* the one who stained them!" "Whoever found it, browned it."
Ahh Mandalore, you always deliver. I've been watching your reviews since I was 14. I'm about to be 20 this year, and I still get hyped to see a new upload
I actually once wrote a campaign setting for Fate (universal tabletop system) where humanity is a somewhat evil empire with organic spaceships. Except organic spaseships were comsic leviathan whales that just happened to be there and humanity rode them into the stars. It was a sci-fi horror setting where humanity abused reality-breaking creatures beyond their comprehension, it was pretty fun.
If you’re wondering, yes the setting was inspired by the Gojira album. As well as Dishonored. At the time the first one came out, I beat it, loved it and then wrote the whole thing.
Also reminds me of the Leviathan books, read them as a kid and there was a whole thing where instead of zeppelins the Allies were using sky whales. Shit had a whole ecosystem too, it was like mice or beetles or something that would run around inner membranes of the whale to deliver messages quickly and a whole thing with bees being modified to use honey as a means of repairing the whale I think? It feels like I'm writing about a fever dream but I swear to christ it's all real those books were wild.
@@Spazmonkey625 Now that you reminded me, one of the players called it “Leviathan in space”. I never even knew these books existed. Nothing new under the sun I suppose.
Hot damn, that spaceship guy holding the arch above his head floods back memories of flipping through computer magazines 15 years ago and seeing this game for the first time.
Holy crap I didn't think I would see the Leviathan Trilogy get mentioned anywhere on the internet anytime soon. You just pulled back a lot of fond teenage memories for me
For those of you who don't get the reference at 4:30 it's a reference to Society, a movie I recommend you watch at least once. Mandy talks about it at length in a video called Society (feat. MandaloreGaming & Brendaniel) | Pondering Spooky Tapes
My mind also went immediatly to the Leviathan books when I heard bio-spaceships. I read the books a long while ago, and I always felt like the concept was so unique and interesting, especially considering they are meant for 12-16 year olds.
I always think Lexx, which also has evil humans ruling the universe with similar batshit insane comedy horror. I'm 100% certain the Serbs who made the game were fans.
I got the game myself from the DVD of a gaming magazine and remember that I hit quite a brick wall at some point and gave up for some reason... but I did find the setting quite intriguing.
I agree with Mandalore that having the protag be a diet version of The Rock is a missed opportunity. This game needs a main character who takes great joy in being genocidal imperialist, a certain dwarf amongst dwarves might be a good choice
I love everything about this game but man, it’s nuts haha. What a wild trip. I kind of love it because sometimes Sci-Fi feels very gatekeepy on if you’re doing HARD sci-fi with heavy, scientifically viable world building, and anything else is just lame or kiddie or somehow lesser. This feels like someone went SCI-FI and ran with it haha. No holds barred, no restrictions, no concerns about making every aspect of it completely viable, and I kind of love that.
You may enjoy playing Nexus the Jupiter incident. Its got pretty deep combat, outfitting ships with unique loadouts and targeting individual elements of an enemy ship. Its an old game but it for sure ticks a few good boxes Ive never seen any other game replicate.
Well, it's too bad the game always seemed rushed. Goes from realistic missions where you explore and actually have to think. Then a few hours in, suddenly turns into a mix of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, with mostly battles that aren't suited for the game engine at all.
@@kristoffer8609 Although that is not completely unfair. I do have to give the game credit for tackling a 3D environment, pretty immersive combat and decent visual effects for the time on top of creating a combat system that is both entirely unique (to my knowledge) and functional. Lazers, kinetics, missiles, point defences, torpedoes and attack craft all serve their function. What other game lets you actively target the enemies engines only to then position your ship at such an angle that you can pummel the ever living crap out of them while safe from their weapons because they cannot turn to face you. And its not just engines, all systems are targetable. The game had a lot of potential and its a shame it never got the time or sequal it deserved.
Its on the list and has been for a while now(though no clue where the actual list went). From what I remember Manda also played it before so he is aware if nothing else.
@@jojothehamster Oh for sure, it's a game with a lot of great ideas. Some of the missions are the best and most immersive I've seen in any space sim. I just remember being quite disappointed with how the quality falls off and it almost turns into a different game. Was almost a chore to finish it because the story and gameplay suffers so badly after a while. Quite a shame it never got a sequel or re-imagining to fix those issues. It was a truly great foundation they could've built off.
As a a fan of the Homeworld series and Sins of the Solar Empire, I am ashamed to admit that I completely missed this game. It looks absolutely amazing, the bio-ships are incredible.
I'm so excited for this! I've been kind of obsessed with this game since watching one of my brother's mates playing it on release, and I've never been able to actually play it myself. Kind of disappointed with how they squandered the premise, but there's something slightly charming about taking a really interesting, dark premise, and then just making all of the characters and motivations really puerile.
A lot of commonalities with Ring, this one: based on a worthwile story that most people don't know about, intresting aesthetic, but dragged down by incompetent execution and tacking on a story that not only doesn't have anything to do with the one it's based on, but it's brain poison in it's own right. I would have centerd the story around Ikona having to balance the demands of the three different chairs versus his own goals and the necessities of his campaign. Maybe the Universal Heart could have started as a wild rumor that Ikona was chasing as a hail mary to regain the satus he lost with the disappearance of his father, but as soon as it become clear it actually exists the Chairs start trying to put their fingers in his pie and that's when you start fightin units like your own, or even more powerful. But then again, this would have deprived us of Melagio, the Guy Who Stole God's Parking Spot One Time.
I am so glad you reviewed this game. I remember back in 2007 (I thought it was 2004 before you told us the year) I was walking around Future Shop. I loved Future Shop back in the day. Hundreds of video games for each system and alot of them I never heard of. I remember seeing the cover of Genesis Rising and was blown away from the box art. In the gatefold, it showed an alien ship that looked alive! It was terrifyingly cool! Ever since that day, I was trying to find that game without success, till now! Thank you!
Oh God yes the Leviathan trilogy of books has always been a favorite of mine, it has been an inspiration for biomechanical ships and vehicles and I wish more sci-fi would explore it.
I saw this in my feed and had to do a double-take. Never expected to see content about it! Played it a fair bit as a kid and never knew it was made by a local studio.
It's in works like these that someone has a dream. But has neither the talent or the budget to put it together. Despite this, the mess that came out in the end is still weirdly fascinating.
I've never heard about this game but I absolutely loved it, I loved the concepts and ideas, although the execution could be better. This is something I totally would've loved as a kid
Man, this game looks so cool. Great find, thanks for sharing. Bioships are rare by my brainstem is making them a few bells. Escape Velocity I believe had some, 'Nids need no elaboration, Zerg technically, feels like there should be more. Edit: War Planets.
Ayyy, the Leviathan trilogy. Never seen someone bring it up before but YES, that setting and concept was amazing and young me absolutely loved the books. I always wished it got picked up for a miniseries.
This was the game that introduced me to organic spacecraft. As a kid who only enjoyed symmetry in ship design, the fact the ships here looked weird turned me away. But that beluga whale-thing ship is burned into my memory and seeing the thumbnail…it’s like I saw it the first time.
![A Cleric for Trench Crusade & The Importance of Regular Practice (Ew!) [How I Paint Things]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KyZKpd5KMqE/mqdefault.jpg)
Genesis Rising on Steam - store.steampowered.com/app/3230/Genesis_Rising/
I'm glad to see a lot of people thought they imagined this game. It's a lot to take in.
Aslan ate my son, Mandy. Please help, he won't leave the chik-fil-a.
I actually bought this when it was newish, or more accurately my dad bought it for me on one of our occasional gamestop visits where I looked at the back of boxes for 15 minutes until deciding which game I was gonna play for the next month or two. I don't think I made it past two missions before going back to play mechwarrior.
@@infelsphere7526 oh man, you've just made me remember how my dad and I would go to a game store every few months and pick up one game on sale.
That's how I found Halo 3 when I was 6, and me and my dad played it a lot.
Nowadays, he and I mostly play Arma and racing games, but we still occasionally play games like Halo.
Thank you for the coverage of our first video game :) It's been a while since someone mentioned Genesis Rising :) If we can answer any questions regarding the game you might have, please let us know :)
Please please, add "Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends" to your to-do list.
That game feels like it was fever dream. It had everything in it.
Hi, @MandaloreGaming, I'm one of the Genesis Rising's developers. Thank you for doing this excellent and humorous review - surprised that you dug it out after all this time, I enjoyed watching it very much, and considering how flawed the game was, you were actually very kind :)
None of us at Metamorf had any previous professional experience whatsoever at the beginning of the production - a few of us did some experimental game development as a hobby, but nothing nearly close to this scale, so it was a madness to start it with such a small team, and a miracle that it actually came out.
The production took many years because we were also building the engine from scratch, together with all the tools for world-editing and directing in-game real-time interactive sequences (which was bleeding-edge tech for that time and wasn't used at all, the publisher decided for pre-rendered cutscenes), with its own visual scripting language embedded, designed specifically for directing cinematic scenes that vary depending on information from simulation and vice versa. The idea was to be able to see the fleet you designed through the main ship's window during the dialogues, it was fully implemented and cut out from the final game in favour of video-clips. The multiplayer code supported hundreds of entities in the scene over the very slow modems of that time, which most of the games in that era didn't have. Multiplayer mode was actually the main focus of development, and the best part of the game, inspired very much by Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game - it was full 3D at the begining, with all the problems with orientation that being in zero-gravity brings, so it was "nailed" to a 2D plane later in development; it even had realistic physical movement of spaceships (accelerated half of the way and then thrusted in the other direction to stop at a designated point), but that made spatial distances and all strategies around them totally meaningless, so we threw that out too. The multiplayer idea never took off with the publisher as it required additional investment for server maintenance etc, but it was actually fun to play in LAN, not sure if it's possible with the released version.
We did most of that work (engine, the world-editor and the game) with 4 (in letters: four) developers, and 6-8 artists, depending on the moment. The budget was actually miserable, until in the last year the publisher jumped in, doubled the team and "spiced up" the production value with cinematics. I still cringe at those Warhammer-like armors and the ship interiors with blinking lights, because originally everything was organic, like in the Cruciform comic book - from the elegant suits with veins growing on human bodies, to command room that looked like a crosover between a whale's stomach and a cathedral. The style of characters in the initial version was also much more cartoony and could be described as "Disney meets David Cronenberg in H.R. Giger's living room", but all of that was dropped by publisher as it was considered "too East-European", and replaced with something they thought Warhammer or H.A.L.O. audience would like more.
Flawed as it was, this project was started in the moment when the game industry didn't exist AT ALL in our freshly bombed country, exausted by a decade of wars. It has demonstrated that even in those circumstances, it is not impossible to start and finish (albeit with sticks and ropes) a fully fledged "almost AAA" game, and has inspired many others to get into the industry, which is today very healthy and growing in Serbia.
Thank you once again for the review, it is much appreciated.
That's awesome to hear that the ambitions had been so much higher, and that the 3D space Homeworld influence still came through despite all the cutbacks that had to be done due to the rough development conditions. Thanks for all your hard work. Despite how unstable it was it still stuck with me all these years later and a game worth remembering is pretty special.
No wonder humanity in this game is so reminiscent of NAZO
It would be great if you guys could get the band back together and remake this game with visuals on the level of Scorn and everything else as you envisioned it. Maybe some rewrites of the story a bit. Just imagine the henta-I mean fan content people will make!
Honestly, knowing the story behind the game makes the achievement of building a game like this extremely impressive, and makes its flaws understandable.
It's like finishing your work on your first big school project while the building is on fire. Sure, it's got flaws, but considering what you were dealing with at the time, those flaws are forgivable. The project had some really awesome ideas in it too that deserve more expansion.
May I inquire if you plan to create a similar game as this? It may not be perfect but certainly had a lot of fun, Im hoping that maybe a retelling with a more serious tone :v, perhaps more bio-ships the size of titanic proportions? I mean nothing speaks more terrifying as a massive bio-ship heading to your fleet
Hearing "the last unexplored galaxy" is such a grand fucking statement if you understand anything about the sheer unhumanly absurd scale of the universe and it's delivered with all the gravitas of a dude telling you your coffee is ready.
Kinda terrifying if you think about it. It means that the universe has an edge and humanity found it.
@@discipleofdagon8195 no wonder they became so edgy themselves.
@@dimas3829 bro
@@discipleofdagon8195 nah, whats more terrifying is when our universe dies its completely possible another big bang might happen meaning that we may not have been the first. Assuming the void of space is truly infinite there could be an unimaginable number of previous universes that ran their course and burned out. If you think about it that way our existence is infinitesimally small.
@Disciple of Dagon well, considering space-time "curves", wouldn't it be less an "edge" and more of a "loop"? Like if you travel in a straight line through the universe you'll eventually end up where you started(not counting any movement your starting point might have made itself, but you get what I mean)
Humanity going on a universe-wide genocidal campaign to search for some mythical item just to rewind time to make an even stronger human empire is 100% A+ human writing. The aliens that wrote this script knew what they were doing!
Hello! My name is Average Human Writer! We would like to invite you to our test ch-... I mean, Human Writer Con that's being held at your local flying saucer. Please arrive alone.
Yours truly,
Someone who's totally not going to dissect you,
Average H.W.
Jumbo
Humanity just wanted to play New Game+
I honestly love the idea of "All of the universe exists to annoy one guy because God thinks it's funny to mess with the first being he ever made". It makes God look like he's one of those Roller Coaster Tycoon players who build Mister Bones' Wild Ride and just sit there, watching it, giggling to himself the entire time.
Like the Firstborn from Jericho, except that idea was really, REALLY good and needs to be expanded on.
"Hey there, it's Josh..."
@@Marcara081 I loved the backstory and lore of that game and wish it got a follow-up. Heck, I'd settle for a visual novel as long as the setting and characters remained that creative.
I know eve is all I'm saying to uou
well, if god exists, i think it would be something like that - a tycoon type player giggling at what he created...
I love how essentially the "conspiracy" of the government already controlling the universe is to do the exact same thing but even better this time
They literally want to do New Game+. It's brilliant
This whole Plot and Setting is if you read all the Serbian Balkan memes and made that the entire plot.
Serbia was so Powerful they Rule the Universe, Serbia is so Oppressed they are made strong by God who is Serbian, Serbia Make Aliens their servants but Serbia is Kind so they let them live but Aliens betray Serbia, Serbia Betray Serbia so Serbia can be stronger, Serbia is Forever.🇸🇰
And script somehow think it evil :D like, evil compared even to all other things characters do and could do
Having the final battle in a time travel plot be against yourself from the different endings, that's downright inspired.
Not even Looper and Steins;Gate can do that.
the closest to it for me is Dragons Dogma. you fight your finished Character if you play NG+, pick a different choice and played offline.
@@michaelandreipalon359, F*cking hell I see you everywhere. Is it because I recognise the Lumity PFP, yeah it is, but damn. Are you stalking me?
@@Jaydee8652 Heh, nah, just having similar preferences when it comes to this channel.
They did that in empire earth
In like, a Bioware RPG or something, the ending final battle being yourself versus the yourself-who-picked-the-other-endings is actually pretty fun idea for a final battle.
Has a very Planescape: Torment feel to it.
Yeah that's a legit fantastic idea. Get the ending you want by facing yourself.
Very Shin Megami Tensei.
@@Shenaldrac
"Now I must fight myself after defeating Lucifer in the hidden ending that requires jumping through several hoops that are unknowable unless you replay the game a few times or Google it! Truly, my ideals must be at the forefront of this new world, and subscribe to the best ideology of the only 3 that exist within this world!"
Also after you beat yourself an entirely new super hidden Boss appears on the next playthrough, it's you, but with all the most overpowered skills to use against the MC, like Pierce and the ridiculous physical skills like Friekugal you unlock later on haha.
@@AveSicarius "Truly, my ideals must be at the forefront of this new world."
Lmao that's pretty funny.
This setting is insane. The WHOLE universe being explored gave me pause but calling someone on the phone actually summoning a clone of them made me take a break.
I can believe it, no space faring civilisation would ever stick to just one single galaxy. The only reason we don't see multi galaxy civilisations in sci fi all that much is because the milky way alone is big enough to carry an entire setting as it's own self contained universe even if most video game and tv show writers have such a shitty grasp on sense of scale they rarely understand that (see mass effect and the whole revelation that humanity for some reason had to evacuate the milky way whole sale rather than just hide out in an uncharted region for 1000's of human years and strike back later with ships that don't have peashooters for a main gun this time)
Same, and I have an insane diet for crazy.
They do all this insane worldbuilding, but then the characters complain about certain parts of space *being cold.*
It's like they fired everyone who knew what they were doing halfway through development.
@Rick just like how nobody will fly over Antarctica because "it's too cold"
Yeah right!
@@Rick586 as if that wouldn't be possible. We researched only vacum close to our planet. For all we know, it could go lowere than -100000 C in other regions of the universe.
Tbh the opening father-son bonding time actually does fit the nightmarish setting, but it lacks one critical element: The perspective of the outsider. I’m reminded of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that features Picard being tortured by the Cardassians. At one point the torturer is sitting in the interrogation cell with his daughter on his knee, doting on her as he tortures Picard. Picard asks him how he could allow a child to witness such horror, at which point the torturer is genuinely confused, and asks him why, given that his daughter has been taught that enemies of the Cardassian state deserve their fate.
This scene is missing its Picard-analogue. To Iconah and his father, this *genuinely is* a fun, super-cool outing between father and son. A genuine heartfelt bit of bonding. To an outsider, it is a father teaching his son how to best order a giant slave-beast to kill. But without the outsider, that part is de-emphasized. We only experience it through the eyes of the characters present.
I disagree. The player themselves is already such an outsider. Putting a character in there just to fill that role would feel artificial. Star Trek does it that way for the obvious reason that Picard is already the protagonist of the show before such a scene was ever imagined so naturally we just keep following his perspective. But generally putting an outsider into your world just so that the audience can discover the world along with the character is considered a cheap escape from trying to describe the world in an organic way by just letting the audience witness it. In a way it's a "tell instead of show" situation where instead of being shown the world you get told about it by this outsider character. Just think, what is are your first thoughts whenever you hear of another new isekai show? Sure, there are gems among those too, but usually that genre label alone is enough to expect it to most probably be some kind of trash.
21st century Pov character isn't necessary; just the whiplash alone already tells you everything.
Picard's been through a lot. But reality TV?! That's going too far. Inhumane torture!
@@HanakoSeishin I think there’s some miscommunication here, I don’t mean a *setting* outsider, I mean a *cultural* outsider. Picard and the Cardassians occupy the same setting, but Picard is an outsider to Cardassian culture. Such a thing could be accomplished by hearing random comms chatter from destroyed ships as their crews panicked. However, I must acknowledge @StriderXYZ’s comment that the outright whiplash of the scene serves as its own dramatic highlight. Tonal dissonance is an under-utilized narrative tool, and can often stand on its own merits.
@@carnedulce Lol. DS9 could’ve been accurately renamed “Keeping up with the Cardassians”!
"So we don't get the more sentimental bits of H. R. Geiger's Eragon."
Mandy why have you cursed me with such an amazing concept that I will never be able to experience? A concept like that sounds so fucking amazing yet I know it cannot exist.
Get writing brother!
Playing the Xavier Renegade Angel music over Iconah talking with alternate versions of himself is genius
It was me who bequeathed thee the psychopathological hand me downs.
So it was you who stained them!
Your mother is so superficial she probably judges things by their appearance!
@@KrazyKaiser whoever found it, browned it
So the music was actually from Xavier. I immediately got those vibes and thought I was losing my mind XD.
Shakashuri blowdown
I couldn’t help but laugh when Mandalore cut to homeworld for a breather during the bit that can only be described as the “future’s future future”.
l put my hamster in a sock and slammed it against the furniture
My brother and me went to a bootleg game store when we were kids and we ended up picking this game up simply because of the cover art
I can't imagine how much less it might have sold without that cryptic cover.
Same. I never forgot seeing it in store just once, and finally websearched it a decade later. Oh, what a disappointment that it wasn't an obscure masterpiece...
This game feels like it could *only* be bought at a bootleg game store.
I got this at a Target or K-Mart when I was a kid. This and Nexus the Jupiter Incident are both pretty good sci-fi RTS. When they work.
@@unclesam1756 at the time in Serbia the only game stores were bootleg game stores! Burned DVDs all day
Fun facts about the Lapis:
1. Their biggest ships are actually carved PLANETS.
2. You can steal their builder ships and build your own Lapis.
3. Lapis means "Stone" in Latin.
"2. You can steal their builder ships and build your own Lapis."
How good are their ships?
@@Bloodlyshiva It depends on the level in which you capture them. As the player-made Lapis use the same genes as the NPC Lapis from their respective levels, Early on, they're very weak, but they are quite strong if you can nab a builder in the endgame. It's fun to petrify enemies and many levels have asteroids in them.
The concept of humanity riding biological eldritch space ships and it comes across as humanity being more alien than the aliens in the galaxy.
Not so much with their story, however. It's rather out there, exactly.
that's where Lapidos comes from in pokemon
It also means pencil in Filipino
I kind of really like how casual some elements of this are. Like...the universe is conquered, humanity drives around nightmare-ships but people still get blasted on alcohol and get horny about boobs. There's something kind of striking about the fact these people are still fundamentally human. And man, so much stuff in this game needs another swing taken at it. There are SO many cool ideas here.
Alcohol and tits are a fundamental part of the human experience. If we ever lose those we cease to be human. Simple as.
they're making clones of people for teleconferencing and somehow they haven't found a way to just spawn them in disconnected from the original like a dirty holodeck (or for more practical purposes, turning some trusted guy into your own Duncan Idaho), so I'm disputing their humanity part
I haven't read the rest of the Dune series yet do they ever get the idea to just clone Duncan enough times to make an army
EDIT: I mean Gholagize or whatever the term is
Squirl
Alcohol woohooo
I'm still struggling to parse how the gorgeous yet nightmarish biomechanical ship designs are part of the same game where the cutscenes look like id Software's version of Xavier Renegade Angel.
God: "Me bequeefed thee."
Mellagio: *REEEEEEEE*
You can find only something like this in Slavjank.
Very few genres come close to this kind of feeling.
The idea of the final boss of a video game with multiple endings being the you's who chose the other endings is actually kind of dope. I can maybe imagine this working in a fully-fledged RPG? Maybe the other you's could have different classes, abilities, and personalities than your current character to give you a taste of different playstyles to incentivize you to replay it. They could even allude to other events you never saw because of the choices you made on your current playthrough.
You have a have a big brawl with multiple variations of your character. Basically have 1 version that's your mirror match, and then a bunch of other versions that are varying degrees different, from different variations of your class, to different classes different builds for that class. Maybe even nice little minor details based on character creation stuff. Depends on whether this going to a tough fight against yourself or a more a comedic episode where you have a level that is filled with nothing but different versions of the player character.
@@spookmeyer970 There's a game for that, also an RTS, called Achron. It's about 3 races, each with their own time travel mechanics, fighting each other. It's fantastic. In the end (spoiler: due to time travel shennigans, your commander AI character ends up stuck in a repeating cycle, and turns out to be the tech that all 3 races use for coordinating time travel)
I was going to mention the Dark Souls 1 cut content that toyed with this idea. But since someone else brought it up I can add that the final boss of Dark Souls 3, Soul of Cinder, does technically do the "version of the player who chose different builds" concept.
There, the idea is that your character from the 1st game is manifested alongside every other person who linked the flame (IE went for the "canon" ending). So the boss puts in mind all the different builds your character would have gone for and even mixes them up when he switches between builds. The boss can have a straight sword build with a passive sorcery spell active or a spear build with a pyromancy damage buff.
@@8Kazuja8 nah, just like divergent timelines meeting up or like some kind closed timeloop fuckery. Doesn't have to get too bad to still have fun with it
It could even be a good concept for a sequel. Yeah, it could mean a third of the game would be unplayable in a single playthrough, but it's still an interesting idea.
I stumbled and my knees went weak. I gripped the side of the bus shelter I was standing beside for support. Genesis Rising. The title of the video opened a cellar of memories. Forgotten for decades, ones of frustrating missions and never being sure what's going on with anything I was doing. They flooded back into me like the memories of a long dead race bestowing arcane knowledge upon a hapless explorer. But these were not lost antediluvian technological blueprints, no forgotten incantations, no forbidden spells of deathless gods. These were the memories of Genesis Rising, and I am now poorer for remembering.
Good video!
I somehow instinctually read your comment in a Max Payne voice. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
This was art. Thank you
good shit, really put me in your shoes, I hate the feeling
Between this, Vangers, Hammerfight and more weird games than I can remember, I'm astounded how Slavs are so good at building fascinating worlds.
Man, I remember absolutely destroying my wrist playing Hammerfight
Were I to hazard a guess, I would say that most Slavs live in countries that are not the most pleasant to live in (both in terms of economy and climate), we had at least 1 destructive war or oppressive regime in the living memory of large part of population, the cultural memory is an all-over-the-place stew of numerous traditions from pagan age, the East-West mixture brewed through Late Medieval to Industrial, distinct Romantic flavour of the above and whatever garbled scraps of Western development snuck their way behind the Iron Curtain usually way past the expiration date in the USA: we're just all a little mad and it's just how we deal with it. Some make bizarre masterworks of science-fantasy, some do extreme parkour, some go into politics...
It's mostly a joke, but really, if there's something unique about Slavs is casual acceptance of how mad and unfair life can be. I know, I'm Polish. Tounge-in-cheek complaining is a national pasttime.
Many of them might turn out as crap, but it's still inspiring for new sci-fi writers to just not care what people might think and go wild with crazy ideas.
I'd throw Pathologic, Void / Turgor, and Perimeter (only first) in this list.
Perimeter is in the same universe as Vangers.
Slavs are mostly immune to the tropes of Western fantasy and science fiction due to having spent almost a century without access to fantasy at all and only a small trickle of state-approved Western science fiction. This gives people a fresh perspective.
I’ve never heard more genuine fear when Mandy asked “is he going for the fish?”
It wasn’t even Size 2
Shadow over Innsmouth in a nutshell.
I was f*cking dying on the floor 🤣
EDIT: Also, I got your Ultrakill reference, @Sam M
@@92edoy so thats what he meant by it? its somehow an ultrakill reference?
@@LazyBuddyBan yes. In the last update Hakita included level 5-S. I don't want to spoil anything since it's recent, but I think if you either play said level or read the lore on the Wiki, you should easily get the reference.
Either that, or watch GluD3 last videos. Fair warning, it's a LSD journey :P.
This game sounds like the definition of “it has potential”
Cool bioships, human empire, mutations and supernatural/spiritual themes.
If they rebooted this IP today i bet it could be amazing
You would think that the spiritual would clash against transhumanism. It would be better to focus as only two main factions to start off so religion vs Geiger?
@@DM-mi4je Spiritual Transhumanism is featured in various Sci-Fi settings. Prime Example The Mechanicus
From experience with games and media like this, "it has potential" often ends up being meaningless, if the makers fail to build on it. Like, its great how such an insane setting can make you think about the world and possibilies, but thats your head doing the work, not the game.
The game took cool themes and meshed them together, and mostly mostly failed to deliver, except in some of the visuals and 10% of the soundtrack.
Probably better to leave the creative heads to use and execute on their own, cool concepts, rather than have them try to fix the IP.
And sometimes executing a generic idea well can be worth more than a bad unique game. IMO thats why we remember Halo 1-3, and not Genesis Rising. The orinal Halo trilogie is really generic in so many ways, with colorful 80s aliens and the most basic military scifi. But it managed to create cool gameplay and a fun setting. If anything, Halo under 343 Industries became a bit more crazy, but also much worse executed.
@@ForceshildLP transhumanism is satanic because God wants His creation to take care of themself. Satan wants His creation to harm themselves
Keep that in mind if you ever get pressured into accepting it, if it ever comes to reality.
Just put these guys in as the antagonists of Homeworld 3.
Agreed, I loved the living ships in Farcscape and I love the idea here. Living ships will always be such a cool and unique idea, I wish more things used that idea and ran with it. Biotechnology, living technology, things that should be inorganic but being alive has always been such a weird, eerie and cool idea.
I think no man’s sky’s has something like that. Their living ships are Neato.
It's overdone at this point. Far from unique
Lexx alois one, and has that weirdness of a living ship,
its also tboth very campy, very 2000 and weird and great.
And doesnt roin hobbs have a living ship trilogy. its fantasy, but still.
I think with how popular Evangelion was (and still is) makes living technology not all that new in media, it's also a high bar most of the time Is done the story gets very existentialist.
Living ships are an exceptionally stupid idea.
There’s nothing a flying meatball could do that a machine could not do better. And a machine won’t be stopped by a random case if the flu.
"you could put an eye out with those things, lady" - top tier dialogue, give the writer a prize for that one. Had a hearty laugh
Truly some Channel Awesome movie level writing...
Boobs. Boobs are eternal.
"I thought of a universe where everyone becomes genetic freaks"
You know, a world full of nothing but Scott Steiners DOES sound rather horrifying.
You could say that it sounds not normal, and that your chances of winning would drastic go down.
YOUR FAT! WE WENT TO WAR BECAUSE HE'S FAT!
"But Mellagio was betrayed."
"Betrayed? Betrayed by whom?"
"God."
"What?"
I've barely started watching, and yet immediately this is a fucking awesome dialogue.
Edit: Wow the dialogue in general is, uh...
Lorgar vibes
YOU COULD PUT AN EYE OUT WITH THOSE THINGS LADY
I flipped my lid, thinking that was voiced by the meme VO guy, Luke Correia.
So relatable. Doesn't everyone feel that way?
My favorite part is that that line isn't Mellagio being melodramatic or over the top or blasphemous or anything, Mellagio is being 100% legit.
The evil human empire with biological ships reminds me of a graphic novel called "humanity lost" by Callum Stephen Diggle.
Yeah I was gonna say the same thing. Cool ass book.
Kinda but at the same time it wasnt humanity who ruled but some ai if I remember correctly
@@cyprus1005 yeah, I was disappointed by it cause it's not really humanity that's evil. They got taken over and the last human alive is a good guy.
"evil human empire"
No such thing, xeno-loving traitor.
@Richard Percival doesn't he die immediately?
I literally died when the protagonist argued with himselves. The dead monotone acting of the same dude voicing three of himself is beyond comical.
the Xavier Renegade Angel music Mand edited in the background killed me
@@Xenomorthian My god I just realized that, died all over again.
I had to watch clips from Xavier: Renegade Angel as a mind-cleanse after listening to Lord Mandalore explain this game's plot, which is *really* saying something.
The scene of the three protagonists bickering with each other immediately reminded me of Xavier saying "You're the sad figment of my twisted psyche's tragic dividend" to his doppleganger.
@@peacemaster8117Probably because he was playing the xavier theme
When it was revealed that all life in the universe was created just to spite Gothmog's dyson sphere, and his big revenge plot was foiled by God jacking the universe up 10^10000% in MS-Paint, I swear I started howling with laughter.
it was gimp, ya gimp.
I know. It is hilarious.
Mandalore's content is perfect to sit back, relax and grab some snacks. I respect the fact he has been doing YT for 11 years
How was Internet Historian's new video?
You goddamn right.
*yawn*
Unlike a lot of other TH-cam creators with their endless ads.
@@Kektus1 I too don't understand the worshipping of TH-camrs
you know, the humans in this game somewhat remind me of the Greneer (or how it's spelled ) from Warframe. From what I can remember at least of the old warframe lore, Greneers are humans that started using cloning and bio tech to the point where they barely function without lifesupport etc and their ships and armour has this very Geiger esque feel to them with odd shapes and tendens.
Grineer were clone labourers of the Orokin before the collapse, suffering from gene/dna degradation due to millions and millions of past batches.
Orokin structures are packed with meat; presumably living, presumably edible. You can see it being harvested in Cetus.
Somehow I got that vibe from the biotech in this game; and the whole hyper advanced race thing too.
So kinda like the Asgard in Stargate? Where they cloned themselves into being completely unfunctional?
there's also the infestation, a plague that fuses its biological elements to technology. the jordas golem very much fits the visual of a fleshy, living ship after being taken over by it.
@@watariovids1645 Pretty much, with an undercurrent of the Imperium of Man - they hate everything and everyone that isn't born of their clonelines and want to exterminate, enslave, or one and then the other to all other life. (Their archrivals, the Corpus, are a shinier, more Mac version of the Adeptus Mechanicus.)
Brilliant move releasing an April Fool's Day video a day early. You almost had me convinced this was a real game.
In the distance: FOOOOOLEEED YOOOOOOOUUUU~
I've never heard of this game before, this is some Ross's Game Dungeon levels of preservation.
Holy shit this has got to be the first time in my life someone has acknowledged the Leviathan series. It has got to be one of my favorite fictional universes ever and I am both surprised and over the moon that it is still being talked about.
Same I grow up loving the series and sadly wasn't as popular as his other books. I alsowish someone would make an game based on the idea/universe.
@@TheNewdawn1st This isn't really the same, but there's a mod for Hearts of Iron IV called Pax Britannica. It's basically an alternate-history WWII, and instead of tanks you use mechs and biological aberrations. Even the barbed wire is alive and angry. It's about the closest thing I can think to a playable version of Leviathan.
I was stunned too. The Leviathan series was one of those books that I read when I was younger and have yet to hear anyone else bring them up until today
@@hirocheeto7795 ooh, nifty! Thanks for the heads-up!
The whole thing with a God's original plan for creation being just this one dude in a much smaller universe is so funny to me. Almost a.... Divine Comedy? (Ultrakill references were great lmao) The part where Mandy expanded an image of space in photoshop while the guy was explaining it cracked me up.
I like to think that god just told mellagio that to mess with it even more
That's a kabbalist myth of creation in a way.
@@jorgenjorgensen2739 There's some definite overtones of certain Abrahamic myths and comedies inherent to that about the nature of God and the devil. But of course, making an entire universe just to prove a point and spite the Satan is almost too human a thing to do to make it believably the plan of God. That definitely gives any type of character or entity doing it far too recognizably human a spiritual visage and personality. As opposed to what the actual realities is, that God is fundamentally alien thinking and unknowable. Because nothing that exists outside time and space and therefore is not even bound to a thing like mortality or time constraints is going to have fundamentally blue/orange thinking and morality. I think the dumber a person is the more they conflate God the supreme being with basically just being an idealized version of their father, fundamentally lacking the kind of intellectual maturity and emotional develop to synthesize the childish idea of "parent is perfect and all powerful" with the juvenile idea of "my parent has flaws and is awful."
It has been my experience that terribly few religious people in this world believe in God, or in the hereafter. They likewise seem to think they get a second body or some complete lies like that. When you die your body rots and you are gone as the person, the thing that is going to be left over, spirit, has no need for food or drink. So the Christian and Muslim idea of heaven being a place with flowing streams is a complete lie. It would be more akin to a state of being. Thus, there's few people who have ever believed in God or afterlife. Most of them are firmly rooted to this world and materialism, and simply believe in sating their carnal desires and worshiping their father and an idealized, romantcized notion of childhood. Right wingers tend to do this a lot. Completely stunted maturity. Truly, narrow is the way and few that have ever found it, and instead are perishing in their errors.
My word, the setting without the cutscenes is one of the most genuinely horrifying future sci-fi settings I’ve experienced. The ship designs are so inspired. I hope someone does pick this setting up one day and does the potential justice.
The idea that these ships are living beings capable of adapting their bodies for warfare adds a little bit to the horror,especially with all the blood sucking and the explosions…and the fact that zoom calls in this universe create a clone of the person you’re talking to
God,biopunk is such a good genre for body horror,and horror in general
Lifter birdie
If anything apparently it was done much more justice prior to being picked up by a publisher, there's a dev who commented above.
@@The_Bird_Bird_Harder Said publisher also (eventually) helped getting this game out of the door however. Just adding some food for thoughts.
@@StyryderX I mean, obviously. It's just always regrettable when things are changed for the worse to fit trends. While they provided funding, and publishing, they also had a not insignificant portion of the game redone to their own taste.
Trade offs I suppose.
Developed by a studio from Belgrade! I remember reading a review on it in a game magazine around 2007. A very vivid memory. The feeling of surprise at seeing screenshots of a game developed so close to home, sharing pages right there with The Burning Crusade made me very proud. And now its on your channel!!
What magazine was it it? I don't remember seeing it in Screenfun or Gameplay.
@@legio1942 Svet Kompjutera
@@legio1942 I remember seeing it in Svet Kompjutera. They had regular coverage and interviews with developers before the release as well. I might have that SK issue and the game disc stashed somewhere.
@@legio1942 Bravo ScreenFun #27. It was their July 2007 release.
@@tech-adeptzeth1648 I can't find my old issues, sadly, but thanks.
That Xavier Renegade Angel reference at 29:06 really made my day. Thank you
This is genuinely such an interesting idea. Most sci-fi settings tend to make humans the runt of the universe. How amazing of an RPG setting would this concept make? A mashup of (oldschool) Spelljammer and Genesis Rising would totally rock.
Elfs use organids of a sort in oldschool Spelljammer, as well as bio-mecha. I have zero interest in nu-Spelljammer.
I always liked it when humanity is treated as if nothing else a proper player cause let's be real we are a vicious race even when compared to our planets wildlife
of all the things I expected to hear in this story.
"Magio is beefing with god because god made life to annoy him" was not on that list, and I am fucking dying from that statement.
I think the most unexpected for me was "And then God made more universe, specifically to one up his first troll of Magio."
should we call an ambulance?
I remember when this game came out! It was a big deal then for all of us Serbian gamers. A proper game, released locally. With global release. All of the game publications were full of them. I think I still have my issue of Svet Kompjutera (World of computers) with the interview and the game. Thanks for the nostalgia trip man!
Reminds me to Imperium Galactica in Hungary, but atleast that was a finished, playable game on release, even getting a sequel.
Svet means light in russian
Hope Mandy checks out Imperium Galactica I and II someday. Also, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.
@@Szgerle it was playable back then. I think these were issues with digital ports and updates to work on modern machines.
@@АндрейНеугодников-м6е Serbia is not Russia and doesn't speak Russian, but hey, good to know.
The Xavier: Renegade Angel theme playing during that argument cutscene makes this entire video come together. It is just that cherry on top that final touch that made me completely lose it.
I was a beta tester for the game, it's such a blast from the past to see you review it now.
I just had a seizure and as soon as I was alone I went and searched up your channel because of how comforting your videos are to me even while I’m alone in this hospital room, just wanted to say thanks honestly
This was the first game that made me feel true buyers remorse. The game was scuffed from the start but it was such a fun concept and I could never truly hate it.
As someone who wants to make a space RTS involving a bio-horror bad guy, this was an extremely welcome review. Lot of things to keep an eye out for gameplay wise so you don't have the same issues when trying to min-max the Evon Swarm's Carrier-Battleship hybrids and Heavy Weapons cruisers without getting flank-spanked by bird dudes with wormhole assisted siege cannons.
"I'll try Shunting, that's a good trick!"
Holy hell man I nearly spit out my drink, you don't pull a SOCIETY reference out that casually!
I keep wishing for bioships in stellaris and these organic ships are the perfect design for them. Especially for the idea of human empire that enslaves and wipes out aliens after repeated attempts by them to do the same thing.
Agree!
you could probably rip the models from this game and make a mod lol
Honestly with the story THIS wild, I'm kind of shocked that the Rock didn't have involved bang scenes with both the Alien Ice Queen AND the council member. The huge tiddy scene was perfect for the ripshit tone of this game, and the ending fight between 3 versions of yourself is honestly a perfect idea with just, terrible execution.
I've never seen the show, but part of this makes me think of LEXX, which was also a living ship with it's own goals and desires separate from it's crew.
I also thought of Lexx, a lot of the janky stuff there would fit right in this game!
@@Finarvas When you think about it, having a living ship with desires would be spooky enough on it's own, like stories with AI. Like you could have a moment like "The ship wants to mate" and have it sound funny, right until you start wondering the logistics of what that could possibly mean, or for you as a crew
@@girthquake1413 Hope you're in the male ship, otherwise get ready to act as the prophylactic.
Also because you've scarred me, I return the favour by just blatantly stating it; preggo shippo.
glad someone else mentioned Lexx, really does seem like it was an influence. The absurdly huge universe spanning scope, the living ships from an evil theocratic human empire, cosmic metaphysical struggles, the combination of grim dark tone and sex comedy farce, it's all there.
They XRA plot twist sent me into complete madness .
Thank you Mandalore
Also I thought I was the only person to appreciate the leviathan books kieth thompson has been an inspiration for me since I was a young teen.
I read the leviathan trilogy back in high school. I loved that series. Especially that weird little lemur thing.
@@brettdibble2763 perspicacious loris
@@Name-de3qw THAT'S THE ONE!
Man, I had always imagined a sort of biopunk story where humanity were like the zerg or the tyranids, though in my mind it was more of an underdog story how those who had nothing managed to use biological tech to grow and become stronger.
I've thought of that too, only the reverse where they aren't the underdog and instead are a universe sized horror that is spreading to other universes, like the tyranid great devourer, but big enough to eat whole universes.
there is actually something like that. a little world building project and a graphic novel going on called "humanity lost" you should look it up
The Xavier Renegade Angel theme as background music is icing on the cake.
I feel like Mandy could start a channel entirely based on the process of actually making these scuffed games work and it would be pretty successful.
No joke, these older games need help running well, and Mandalore detailing what he did to get them running, as well as the how and why, is VERY helpful.
I was able to get an old abandomware game working because of knowledge I got from mandy's videos!
MandaloreCybermancy
I'm honestly surprised he hasn't gone the route of building time specific PCs to run classic games in native, time appropriate hardware and OS lol.
That's what his (occasional) streams are like. It's something to behold, plus you get to see the man fall apart whenever he gazes upon #Lowry.
Having the leviathan trilogy brought up is so much whiplash. I loved those books as a kid but almost forgot about them!
Full honesty: I really miss the gormless honesty and passion of old school voice over. The job was more fun back then, and for all its flaws, the charm is timeless.
Another fantastic episode, Mandalore, as always. Thank ya kindly. :)
Stuff like that is fun, but sadly we are past the time where you could get away with "bad" voice acting.
@@peppermillers8361 Ever played a Piranha Bytes game?
@@RootVegetabIe wanted to.
@@peppermillers8361 It was a rehtorical question :) Much of the VA in their games feels straight out of 1997
@@RootVegetabIe Interesting note: Gothic's protagonist was Eng dubbed by Bradley Lavelle, who was also the Eng dub for Demon City Shinjuku. It was a cozy industry back then.
You know, I always wondered what a Warhammer 40K movie would look like if David Cronenberg directed it and now I have a pretty good idea thanks to this review.
The biotechnology for this reminds me a lot of the sequel/reboot of 90s Image superhero comic Prophet that ran in the 2010s. A far-future human empire of multiple dynasties conquers the galaxy, using an army of genetically adaptive clones of the original John Prophet. Even some of the ships and vehicles were organic, made from John's genetic material.
This was what I picked up after Homeworld, incorrectly believing that all space RTS games were going to be masterpieces.
Your wrong this was a masterpiece but in all they ways youve not expected 🤣
@D3thKn1ght McGee that is completely fair! The blow up big titty alien cutscene is Oscar worthy
@@ultracrab12 "Woah!!!! Look at those proportions!!!!" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@ultracrab12 tbh I fucking nearly died from laughter from that scene alone much less the rest of the voice acting and batshit insane story🤣
Holy shit… this may as well be the prequel to Scorn. This is the civilization that fell apart in that game.
Curiously enough, both Scorn and Genesis Rising come from Belgrade. What is it with Serbs and their appreciation of bodyhorror nightmare?
Ayye yo
Did a Civilization fall apart in Scorn?
@@thefidgetspinnerofdoom Horrifying history has left them all emotionally scarred and warped?
@@thefidgetspinnerofdoomadd the serbian film to the list
Now I want to see HR Giger's Eragon very badly, sounds awesome
Safira is some freakish biomechanical phallic monster that is pitch black and somehow in-between horrifying and intriguing. Eragon ends up in a weirdly sexual position whenever he tries to ride her... Also lot's of leather.
There is a comic currently being written with a similar setting called Humanity Lost by Callum Stephen Diggle were the human are the bad guys but have been mutated and fly in fleshy ships and is has some of the most original alien designs I have ever seen
Ooh, I'll have to check that out. Thanks.
That came to mind too
Dude, I forgot about the Leviathan books. The flechette bats were some of the coolest weapons I've encountered from that kind of setting.
When a new Mandalore video pops up and almost half the runtime is dedicated to the Story, you know you're in for a good time.
Edit: Giant blue alien tiddies... of course, what else?
Mandy buddy, thanks for always being consistent when it comes to your content. I can always know its going to be well recorded and edited. #1 fav channel and it's not even close.
Mandalore reviews an alarming amount of games that can be described as 'bizarre madness'
I love the Xavier renegade angel music in the doppelgänger scene. Excellent taste
i love this so much. bizzare scifi is my favourite thing in the entire world and this one is incredible. might have to suffer through playing this game to experience this
It's not a terrible game at all, in my humble opinion. Its certainly worth giving it a playthrough.
@@jjoshaugh its mainly the crashing thats putting me off
33:31 super happy to see the leviathan trilogy get mentioned! I think it’s an underrated gem that doesn’t get enough attention
So is it YA trash? What's the big appeal of the story?
@@DM-mi4je mostly the appeal is steampunk v biopunk alt-hist setting. For me at least, having read the trilogy back in high-school
It's YA kino
@@DM-mi4je It's decent by Scott Westerfield. He's written a number of other books as well most notably Uglies. The appeal of the story is watching World War I play out with a few changes and examining the different biological weapons thrown together. The author also has a section at the end of each book where he explains which elements he took from real history
I thank you Mandy for putting in the steel pipe falling sound effect. It really brings the whole video toghether.
I really appreciate MandaloreGaming he puts out these entertaining videos without going too crazy with the edits like Seeth or Maxor.
Also nice use of XRA music.
He's the sane version of sseth
It was such an XRA scene, just needed the camera zooming around at high speeds
MandaloreGaming, I found your channel about two weeks ago and I’ve binged all your videos since then. Really awesome work, man. Thanks for the content!
29:07
"You're the sad figment of my twisted psyche's tragic dividend. You're the un-me, I'm the real me. You wanna be, me?"
"Kiddo, I was the real me when you were still in my short-pants."
"Hate to break it to ya, but I wore them first. Me bequeathed thee, the psychopathological hand-you-down."
"So *you're* the one who stained them!"
"Whoever found it, browned it."
Ahh Mandalore, you always deliver. I've been watching your reviews since I was 14. I'm about to be 20 this year, and I still get hyped to see a new upload
I actually once wrote a campaign setting for Fate (universal tabletop system) where humanity is a somewhat evil empire with organic spaceships. Except organic spaseships were comsic leviathan whales that just happened to be there and humanity rode them into the stars. It was a sci-fi horror setting where humanity abused reality-breaking creatures beyond their comprehension, it was pretty fun.
If you’re wondering, yes the setting was inspired by the Gojira album. As well as Dishonored. At the time the first one came out, I beat it, loved it and then wrote the whole thing.
@@Reriiru I wasn't wondering, but cool!
Also reminds me of the Leviathan books, read them as a kid and there was a whole thing where instead of zeppelins the Allies were using sky whales. Shit had a whole ecosystem too, it was like mice or beetles or something that would run around inner membranes of the whale to deliver messages quickly and a whole thing with bees being modified to use honey as a means of repairing the whale I think? It feels like I'm writing about a fever dream but I swear to christ it's all real those books were wild.
@@Spazmonkey625 Now that you reminded me, one of the players called it “Leviathan in space”. I never even knew these books existed. Nothing new under the sun I suppose.
@@Spazmonkey625 those were pretty cool
Hot damn, that spaceship guy holding the arch above his head floods back memories of flipping through computer magazines 15 years ago and seeing this game for the first time.
Holy crap I didn't think I would see the Leviathan Trilogy get mentioned anywhere on the internet anytime soon. You just pulled back a lot of fond teenage memories for me
For those of you who don't get the reference at 4:30 it's a reference to Society, a movie I recommend you watch at least once. Mandy talks about it at length in a video called
Society (feat. MandaloreGaming & Brendaniel) | Pondering Spooky Tapes
My mind also went immediatly to the Leviathan books when I heard bio-spaceships. I read the books a long while ago, and I always felt like the concept was so unique and interesting, especially considering they are meant for 12-16 year olds.
I always think Lexx, which also has evil humans ruling the universe with similar batshit insane comedy horror. I'm 100% certain the Serbs who made the game were fans.
You could try Hamilton's Singularity series. I thought it aged badly, but the hard sci-fi with organic ships is really cool.
Unblievable how you made it through all of that and not giving up on it.
Once again an amazingly entertaining review
I got the game myself from the DVD of a gaming magazine and remember that I hit quite a brick wall at some point and gave up for some reason... but I did find the setting quite intriguing.
I agree with Mandalore that having the protag be a diet version of The Rock is a missed opportunity. This game needs a main character who takes great joy in being genocidal imperialist, a certain dwarf amongst dwarves might be a good choice
I love everything about this game but man, it’s nuts haha. What a wild trip. I kind of love it because sometimes Sci-Fi feels very gatekeepy on if you’re doing HARD sci-fi with heavy, scientifically viable world building, and anything else is just lame or kiddie or somehow lesser. This feels like someone went SCI-FI and ran with it haha. No holds barred, no restrictions, no concerns about making every aspect of it completely viable, and I kind of love that.
This sounds like such a fantastic premise for a game. Maybe someday they'll get a budget and another shot at it.
You may enjoy playing Nexus the Jupiter incident. Its got pretty deep combat, outfitting ships with unique loadouts and targeting individual elements of an enemy ship. Its an old game but it for sure ticks a few good boxes Ive never seen any other game replicate.
Well, it's too bad the game always seemed rushed. Goes from realistic missions where you explore and actually have to think. Then a few hours in, suddenly turns into a mix of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, with mostly battles that aren't suited for the game engine at all.
@@kristoffer8609 Although that is not completely unfair. I do have to give the game credit for tackling a 3D environment, pretty immersive combat and decent visual effects for the time on top of creating a combat system that is both entirely unique (to my knowledge) and functional. Lazers, kinetics, missiles, point defences, torpedoes and attack craft all serve their function. What other game lets you actively target the enemies engines only to then position your ship at such an angle that you can pummel the ever living crap out of them while safe from their weapons because they cannot turn to face you. And its not just engines, all systems are targetable. The game had a lot of potential and its a shame it never got the time or sequal it deserved.
@@jojothehamster Try Starsector. It's 2D but it does all of that and more.
Its on the list and has been for a while now(though no clue where the actual list went).
From what I remember Manda also played it before so he is aware if nothing else.
@@jojothehamster Oh for sure, it's a game with a lot of great ideas. Some of the missions are the best and most immersive I've seen in any space sim. I just remember being quite disappointed with how the quality falls off and it almost turns into a different game. Was almost a chore to finish it because the story and gameplay suffers so badly after a while. Quite a shame it never got a sequel or re-imagining to fix those issues. It was a truly great foundation they could've built off.
As a a fan of the Homeworld series and Sins of the Solar Empire, I am ashamed to admit that I completely missed this game. It looks absolutely amazing, the bio-ships are incredible.
Don’t worry
It ain’t…
Time for another instant watch of a review for a game I've never heard of or been interested in.
I just want to say that you are one of the best creators on this platform. I’m thrilled when I see a new video by you. Thank you for your work!
I swear to god spontaneously hearing the song at 22:38 gave me a pavlovian shock and took me back about 12 years to baby's first adult internet site
It reminds me getting dumped by my girlfriend because i rubbed her left tight, not the right one
I'm so excited for this! I've been kind of obsessed with this game since watching one of my brother's mates playing it on release, and I've never been able to actually play it myself.
Kind of disappointed with how they squandered the premise, but there's something slightly charming about taking a really interesting, dark premise, and then just making all of the characters and motivations really puerile.
A lot of commonalities with Ring, this one: based on a worthwile story that most people don't know about, intresting aesthetic, but dragged down by incompetent execution and tacking on a story that not only doesn't have anything to do with the one it's based on, but it's brain poison in it's own right.
I would have centerd the story around Ikona having to balance the demands of the three different chairs versus his own goals and the necessities of his campaign. Maybe the Universal Heart could have started as a wild rumor that Ikona was chasing as a hail mary to regain the satus he lost with the disappearance of his father, but as soon as it become clear it actually exists the Chairs start trying to put their fingers in his pie and that's when you start fightin units like your own, or even more powerful.
But then again, this would have deprived us of Melagio, the Guy Who Stole God's Parking Spot One Time.
I am so glad you reviewed this game. I remember back in 2007 (I thought it was 2004 before you told us the year) I was walking around Future Shop. I loved Future Shop back in the day. Hundreds of video games for each system and alot of them I never heard of. I remember seeing the cover of Genesis Rising and was blown away from the box art. In the gatefold, it showed an alien ship that looked alive! It was terrifyingly cool! Ever since that day, I was trying to find that game without success, till now! Thank you!
I love those organic living ships. I've had nightmares about living monster ships because the idea fascinates me so much.
Oh God yes the Leviathan trilogy of books has always been a favorite of mine, it has been an inspiration for biomechanical ships and vehicles and I wish more sci-fi would explore it.
I saw this in my feed and had to do a double-take. Never expected to see content about it! Played it a fair bit as a kid and never knew it was made by a local studio.
It's in works like these that someone has a dream. But has neither the talent or the budget to put it together. Despite this, the mess that came out in the end is still weirdly fascinating.
Beautifully said.
I've never heard about this game but I absolutely loved it, I loved the concepts and ideas, although the execution could be better. This is something I totally would've loved as a kid
28:20 Lmao, Mandalore, you're killing me.
And I completely lost it at XRA soundtrack at 29:06 xD
Man, this game looks so cool. Great find, thanks for sharing.
Bioships are rare by my brainstem is making them a few bells. Escape Velocity I believe had some, 'Nids need no elaboration, Zerg technically, feels like there should be more.
Edit: War Planets.
Ayyy, the Leviathan trilogy. Never seen someone bring it up before but YES, that setting and concept was amazing and young me absolutely loved the books. I always wished it got picked up for a miniseries.
Did he mention it?? I didnt notice
@@julianodobler2782 very end of conclusion. Very short you probably just missed it.
This was the game that introduced me to organic spacecraft. As a kid who only enjoyed symmetry in ship design, the fact the ships here looked weird turned me away.
But that beluga whale-thing ship is burned into my memory and seeing the thumbnail…it’s like I saw it the first time.