Olly Roger No You're missing the point. It really symbolizes someone who is comfortable in their own skin. Tail time has been warped to be a gross sexual phrase by these social studies femicommunisms. What this (presumably good christian boy) knows goes deeper than some petty fenminism, this boy knows the truth about the origin of the phrase. It was meant as an attack on the labor movement, i.e. "It's tail time for living wages." This Chad Lindbaum clearly means it as a nodwink to other waken genterlments in the buisimniss. So now you are the fool oliver now the fool is you!!
It all comes back to Earthworm Jim.... thank you Tommy Tallarico for producing this entire video, I hope you get a new world record for most UA-cam videos ever worked on
I heard that Hbomberguy told Tommy "Just make whatever sound effects you think are cool, and I'll make a video around them." It's so cool he's the first American to ever help with an Hbomberguy video.
I actually know what "It's Tail Time" means! I played the excellent "Gex" 2D platformer - the first in the series. It's a fantastic game with a lot of creative platforming and level design. You stick to walls, use your tongue to snap up power-up bugs and weird angles, and use the tail to attack enemies. Only your tail can damage enemies unless you have some sort of power up. You can attack with it like the castlevania whip in different angles, you can bounce off enemies by curling it up like a spring, etc. "It's tail time" means, "It's time to kick some ass" because your tail is your weapon. Dang, I'm actually a pro game designer now and I'm thinking about all those excellent level design elements and mechanics. I should play that game again! The acrobatic wall-crawling, tail-whipping, springing, gameplay made you feel so powerful and gave you so many ways to approach a lot of problems. Also Gex's gimmick was he was a movie/TV-obsessed gecko and he was sucked into the TV to play through various cinematic-genre-themed worlds. Horror, Comedy, etc.
I only played the second Gex game on PS1 and it was so good and underrated, he just didn't control AS smooth as Crash or Spyro... Nothing did, Gex just got overshadowed by games that still blow any platformers out of water today.
"So let's start by looking at this game through a Freudian critical lens. To aid in this, let's talk to an expert on Freudian theory, Dr Sigmund Freudian. Now Dr, how does this - " *Sigmund Freudian holds up copybook open to page of penis graffiti*
@@sunshinethuggery Do it again Bomber Harris! And in all seriousness it's probably because of his anti-fascism. After all, Bomber Harris did do a lot to stop fascism.
To be fair, I heard it was pretty unplayable before the patch because the physics made platforming incredibly poor. It is undeniably fun as it is now, and cheap (I got it for $7)
It wasn't just archaic it did everything worst than the games its inspired by. Which I think is its real issue, yea its irritating it didn't learn from the past and move the genre forward but that would have been acceptable if it had just done what the older games did really well. But it doesn't, the abilities are less interesting, the worlds are far more boring, the NPCs are copy pasted from world to world and make no sense in context, the challenges felt repetitive that fucking minecart shit is so fucking bad its unreal, in banjo kazooie that would have been in 1 maybe 2 worlds and it would have been themed to the area its in. The game was just a mediocre nostalgic trip that managed to be worst than the things that came before it.
"If there's one thing JonTron is good at, it's making meaningless, incoherent noise into a microphone." The delivery of that sick burn kills me every single time
The really funny thing is that Jon isn't even white; he's Persian. He thinks that he himself and his family shouldn't have a right to be where they are.
@@sirlimen333 I dunno dude, he was kinda flirting with all that stuff before he came out and just straight up said it. It feels pretty disingenuous for him to back away from it. I'm all for genuine apologies and people growing, but this feels more like shrodingers dickhead, he got too much flak so he said he didn't mean it.
I think A Hat in Time proves that you don't even need to have area transitions in your levels if you just design your levels the right way. The closest thing I can think of to level transitions is Alpine Skyline, but there the transitions not only gives you a better idea of where you reside spatially in the area compared to the transitions in Yooka-Laylee, but also it's just rad to watch and feature some interactivity. Also, not only does A Hat in Time not put eyes on things, sometimes they take eyes away from things that should have eyes.
There are mods that use them, Clockwork Cape being the best one that comes to mind. There's a lighthouse in the middle of the map that's huge on the inside.
The bit about games playing themselves for you is one of the things that always disappointed me about the Assassin's Creed games. Prince of Persia wasn't like that so it make it super satisfying when you pulled off a series of badass moves to navigate a space. I miss that sort of thing.
I like JRPGs and they tend to have a very go in a line, now fight an an enemy format, but I'm not sure if Assasin's Creed is supposed to be like that..It feels like it's meant to be more action-rpg , so I find it confusing that you can't do a lot of moves on your own....Especially with all the parkour stuff.
@@zoltanz288 I feel like this is kind of the point - it doesn't have platforming. I'm not the biggest fan of those games, but the actual thinking the player is expected to do is along the lines of avenues of approach, scouting enemy and target patrol routes, picking your moment. I don't mind that e.g. Shadow of Mordor doesn't have intricate and satisfying platforming, because the game is about having total mastery of your environment and using it to beat overwhelming enemy forces through stealth or hit and run tactics. You're not meant to get satisfying gameplay out of climbing the fortress itself, the satisfaction comes from plotting takedowns or routes through crowded areas with stealth once atop said fortress, and executing on that plan.
Hbomb's feelings towards Banjo Kazoie are my feelings towards Swiper the Fox, I do not know why, but the rest of the show? Wonderful, light hearted fun! But the bone chilling fear I felt when Swiper showed up? The sheer terror of loosing all the things we needed for our epic quests? My four year old self will never recover
No! Of course not! What kind of sane rational human gamer would I be if I didn't know the release date of Gex: Enter the Gecko, the best game of 12 AM February 28th, 1998?
My childhood was defined by Gex, and everywhere I look, there's another video about 3D platformers saying "lol does anyone remember that trash garbage fire Gex hahaha." Why do you hurt me?
Don't worry, I had the Dualshock Directer's Cut of Resident Evil 1. Hearing everyone rip the OST that gave me night terrors to absolute tatters makes me feel a little silly.
I'm so glad you covered Gex. I completely forgot it existed and was about half sure I'd imagined it. I just had the faintest memories of a James Bond game except you're a lizard.
I remember playing Gex 3 a lot as a kid. The line about 'Does he have sex?' and 'it's tail time!' are definitely knowing. I've not played the older games but in this one Playboy model Marliece Andrada appears in FMV with Gex making all these innuendos about her and at the end it's heavily implied they both do it.
You know, if there was a sequel JonTron could play a polar bear called Eugene Ice. He spends all day in his igloo angry about how all the brown bears are somehow killing off the polar bears by dating his highschool crush, and the entire mission could be about your melting his home so he can finally move on with his life.
The fuck does "cultural genocide" mean? Genocide means forcing a certain group of people to die out. If you think your culture will die out, i gotta ask how. Also, what does that mean? What exactly are you scared of? That people will stop celebrating christmas? That people will stop having barbeques? That kind of thing will never happen. And even if it does happen, who gives a toss? As long as we have laws and values that protect people from injustices, who cares what traditions we celebrate?
12:06 Actually the 3d platformer didn't go away "for a reason", it was slowly eroded as the simplification of controls happened. Uncharted is supposed to be a successor to Tomb Raider, and Assassin's Creed is supposed to be a successor to Prince of Persia - and they kinda are, if you remove all the actual platforming that used to be there.
Banjo kazooie and successors are clearly 3D jump and runs though and those are alive and well. Ever heard of a hat in time or.. oh I don't know, super Mario Odyssey?
Miles Miles In defense of Hbomb, he said “other than Mario” and Super Mario Odyssey was not out at the time of the video. Also it should be said that games like Yooka laylee and Hat In Time were made primarily BECAUSE the 3D platformer had mostly disappeared.
@@4203105 In addition to hat in time and yooka being made to fill the hunger in lack of 3D platformers they were also made by small crowdfunded studios, while in the past you had Naughty Dog (Crash, Spyro), Sony's Japan Studio (Ape Escape), Ubisoft (Rayman, Tonic Trouble) and even Microsoft had their attempt at the genre with Blinx. Nowadays it's mostly Nintendo and small indies who do 3D platformers and for Nintendo it's generally very infrequent releases with 3D Marios (4 years between 3D world and Odyssey. 2 years since Odyssey's release there's not been any tease or announcement for a new game either, so probably will be 4 years between Odyssey and next one too). Sony did they try with Knack and Knack 2, but they're closer to beat em ups than 3D platformers. There's more focus on simplistic fighting with a lot of projectiles, while platforming is more a side thing.
The 3d collectathon absolutely went away for a reason. Without the nostalgia so many have there are really only a few worth playing and like commenters above me said the last bastions of the format are mario and indie games.
1000000% I remember "It's tail time" XD I can't remember which Gex game it came from but the phrase I really remember is "I feel like I'm trapped in Boy George's pants"
The worst is when they have dark underwater bits where you can only see a little bit in front of you. Even when I know there are no enemies still makes me want to want to pull my hair out.
Swamp Cleaner: Communists like Hbomb and I are currently waging war on the capitalists. SORRY IF THAT MEANS YOU DON'T GET YOUR FALLOUT VIDEOS ASAP YOU DAMN BOURGEOIS PUPPET tl;dr it'll get here sometime soon. Tell him to put it in a twitter poll, lol
I know I'm pretty late to the party, but as someone who was addicted to collectathon's from the early 90's, and who actually 100%-ed all 3D Super Marios, Banjo 1, 2, Conker and now Yooka Laylee, I still must admit... Yooka Laylee is very, VERY shoddy and flawed. Six more months of polish and this could have been a truly great game. As it stands, it's worth playing through, but definitely nothing to write panegyrics about.
This isn't my kind of game, but you bring up a good point with the trend AssCreed has set for climbing controls. It's a shame because Ubisoft made Prince of Persia once upon a time, and it was awesome. It effectively married a realistic aesthetic to genuinely challenging gameplay. I understand that AssCreed's climbing mechanics were originally intended to allow the player to use acrobatics in a variety of situations, since it's an open world game. But games like Uncharted seem to have mistook the ease with which the climbing works as an end in and of itself; there is no reason to use an automated system like that in a linear game. I think modern games as a whole have a hard time distinguishing between convenience and fun.
Let me just stick all my climbing shit on for a minute I like the movements in Uncharted and even a few AC animations for the climbing but what bugs me is they don't stress how fucking tiring it can be, it would honestly be incredible for Nate to have to take a breather after scaling some of that shit
Ubisofts Prince of Persia actually doesn't have challenging climbing, the only time I ever died climbing was from accidental jumps or checking to see if ledges were grab-able as it wasn't always clearly visible or communicated, and smoothing out those accidental jumps is really the only thing that the automation effectively changes, the only thing challenging about PoP's acrobatics and climbing was timing to avoid the traps, which was a part of PoP's gameplay and not really with Uncharted, though the entire game is actually no harder than Uncharted honestly, maybe easier due to rewinding. Both games would benefit from being more challenging I think.
Because comparing an action adventure game to a jump and run is totally fair or even rational. But I'm sure in the N64 era everything was different... Oh what's that, Link is climbing those whines and jumping those ledges in ocarina of time just by you holding forward!? Well I'll be monkeys uncle!
The idea for Assassin's Creed's climbing was the same as say, Driving in GTA. Like, GTA's driving wasn't as mechanically demanding as say Gran Turismo's but it facitilated chases, exploration, stunts, drive bys etc. In other words, it wasn't doing the thing that was the challenge, it was applying it. AC works the same way. The climbing there is meant to allow you to navigate, sneak around and explore all seamlessly without seperate controls for each. It does mean indivudal applications like linear tombs suffer but it does allow convient choices when approaches are more open ended.
Hi Hbomb- regarding the level transitions and breaking up levels- even with modern computers this can still be necessary because the assets of the game are much higher quality so the textures and models still fill memory with potentially just the same sized areas. It's probably improved now but also in Unity streaming zones aren't really built-in so it's not trival to do with that engine (there probably is some pretty good middleware for it though) Great video overall, just wanted to mention this particular point
This is what I hate about computers. Every time the hardware gets faster, instead of the software getting faster, the software gets more complex and remains just as slow or will be even slower, because people are more patient when they think about all the features and the fact that professionals NEED to use modern software. It took a second to turn on a C64. Now I have to wait a minute for Windows to boot. The games have the same load time on C64 and today's PC, except their graphics are better now. There is one difference though: in the time of C64, programmers achieved feats in coding trying to get more graphics and more sound out of the same hardware. Is anyone still doing that today? Is anyone trying to write more efficient code to make an open wolrd RPG run even with 4 GB RAM instead of 8? Is there anyone writing more efficient code, so that I don't have to buy a more expensive GPU? Is anyone doing that? Or is everyone just content that they can write the slowest piece of shit, and in worst case they just wait a couple of years while the hardware is getting exponentially faster?
Developers are getting worse about this too- Mafia 3 basically shipped with 30 fps lock and you would get around that speed on even fairly decent modern computers. They patched but it was still fairly much a dog performance-wise
@@algi1 For consoles specificaly, No. Developers tend to write more efficient code and the benfits of faster data streaming are apparent. Let's consider an example, in GTA SA back on the PS2, interiors load seperatly and fast travel is also loaded taking up to 10 seconds at times to fully load. GTA V on just the PS3 was able to have multiple load points compress down to 5 seconds. Since most PC games tend to be ports of console games, they mostly tend to benefit at least indirectly from this
@@algi1 hoo boy 3 year old comment - i hope you've got a better PC by now anyway, you said it yourself - why spend time, money and energy on making optimizations for hardware a small subset of your customer base owns, when you can just throw more processing power at it? software engineering is a series of compromises, and adding features and content will almost always take precedence to wringing out more performance on lower-end hardware, unless you're working on embedded systems i guess. you can still find people who will try to squeeze every last drop out of an aging system, but it's important to acknowledge they're doing it for the fun of it, not for a professional outcome, and that it's building on the knowledge of almost 40 years of experience. there's just no point in doing the same to modern systems when the next year's CPU will blow the performance out of the water.
I've been saying for years: STOP pushing the textures and models so hard. Use the advancing tech to make the levels blend together more. I assume it hasn't happened because it's still extremely difficult and expensive, but is it impossible? If we stayed in Early 2006 graphics, would we have larger levels? You seem like you might know.
Hbomberguy made history, becoming the first youtuber to talk about yooka-laylee in a positive context, even going so far as to betray his communist overlord Jim Sterling
the "issue" with this game is that it's just banjo kazooie: another one. It's a retro platformer with little done to modernize it, and that has a polarizing effect on players.
I'm really glad someone has stepped up to the plate to defend this games upsides. I haven't played this game so far but I spent my youth playing banjo and was really excited about its release, and when everyone began bashing it I directly assumed it was a 4/10 game and thus not worth the money. I think now that you have provided a counter argument to other reviews I can safely make a choice on my purchase. Thank you.
I got Yooka-Lele when it came out. I was working at GameStop at the time, one of my co-workers actually is on the credits because he donated to the crowdfunding campaign. I was too exhausted from work to ever get around to playing it, and the years after that had not been kind to me as after a number of violent episodes I finally started doing the work of digging all the shit out of my brain from childhood. Today I was thinking about maybe playing a new game, because in the last decade I've mostly just played games I already know. I think its time to catch up with all the things I wanted to be joyful about in my life.
@@ggs27 thank you, I am doing my best! I'm having more good days, less terrible ones, and I did finally play some of the games I'd been meaning to! Yay for the little victories ✨
It seems to be a thing in Japanese media? Super Mario RPG has a boss that's a clown on a beach ball. He doesn't throw knives, but his partner (who stands on his head at some point to attack you) does.
You've been blinded by the pretty colors and numerous eyes of the Yooka-Laylee world, Hbomb. Collecting pages? This, truly, is the most intricate Slender clone I've seen yet. (I'm JOKING.) As for game maps, I get what you're saying--that moment you captured in your Fallout 3 video where the gamers completely missed the GIANT ROBOT really sticks out to me--but as someone with... questionable spatial-mapping abilities, I personally appreciate a map, especially in more modern games, with their more expansive landscapes and settings.
His discussion of the mechanic that caused missing the robot starts about 22:24 or so, and then I believe that particular section is a few minutes long at most. Enjoy!
I just realized that I may have responded to my own comment and not yours, so here's hoping this shows up on your feed. (If it already did, just ignore it, my bad!)
Hey I'm two years late to this party, but I think Hbomber's main complaint isn't necessarily the presence of a map, but more of Objective markers that tell you where to go, and possibly a minimap. If you ever played Morrowind, the third elder scrolls game, it has a map; this map has fog of war and basically only symbols for some fairly major points of interest that you'd need to visit multiple times, also the fast travel is weird and more like a public transit system, and you can only do it from weird giant bugs. There also are no objective markers-directions to locations are given with literal text directions put in your in game journal: including shit like TAKE A LEFT AT THE YELLOW FLOWER BY THE LAKE, I shit you not. Later elder scrolls games removed the exploration that morrowind encouraged by just giving you a marker and live tracker on where you need to go, which generally removes the just looking at the world that occured more in morrowind (ironic given that looking back that game kinda looks like dogshit). The presence of objective markers and an omniscient minimap remove the need to explore at all. Games like morrowind had markers, but not many, and only when you opened your map. Finding things was a sort of game inside the game, and the loss of that has replaced fun (and admittedly frustration) with boring convenience that removes you from the experience
@@hellomynameisCECIL Okay almost a year late to you but, as someone who couldn't navigate their way out of a paper bag, a mini-map and objective markers actually encourage exploration. With objective markers I can go out and about exploring everywhere and not worry about having to find wherever I started at so the directions will be useful. I like to explore just for explorations' sake, not because of a "need"; map markers are really just assurance that I'll be able to get to a place when I want to. So, I will would like the option of having a mini-map and quest markers. (the operative word being option)
I think, because Gex uses his tail as a weapon, and he keeps teleporting into dangerous environments, “it’s tail time” means “it’s clobberin’ time.” Or, you know, “it’s time to kick some ass,” or something like that. But hell yeah, I remember Gex! I had all 3 of those games, even though only the second one was really good. But in all three, Gex was voiced by stand up comedian Dana Gould, who I was a huge fan of.
You mentioned From Software in your first point (area transitions), and that brought them to the fore of my mind on all the rest. Soulsborne games draw substantially from Forgotten Secret Game Techniques 2 through 4. There's no automatic jumping to navigate treacherous terrain; generally each action you take corresponds to a button press, and your success is dependent on pressing the right buttons at the right time. There's no minimap, since you're expected to remember your location in the level. And of course, plenty of eyes. (okay the final one is mostly just bloodborne).
With 20+ years of hindsight, I can say that Banjo Tooie was probably my favorite game of all n64. I was bummed by Yooka Laylee because it was indie devs from my childhood, with Grant Kirhope AND they used Unity, which I was getting into at the time. I wanted it to be a home run, but I was kinda disappointed. Here's what I think B-T did well that Y-L did not (at least what comes to mind immediately): -There are few, very large, levels in Y-L. Not inherently bad, but that means you're only limited to 5 themes in the whole game. So you get mismatched characters like the Hamelot pigs in the casino and... space? Why not make a medieval world? That would have been super cool! But I believe the answer is that it takes less time to make one massive level with themed assets than it takes to make two smaller worlds and make different themed assets for each. -On a similar note, only 5 levels means only 5 transformations :( -The arcade games are atrocious. B-T's aren't great but they can be occasionally fun. I don't care how meta Rex is trying to be about old games, they are truly awful. -Honey lets you stick to ramped surfaces. That's clever! But you use it to go up an icy ramp? Somehow ice doesn't feel like something honey would properly stick on. IDK why this one bothered me especially. -Some puzzles need to be solved with a move, but they APPEAR to be solvable with another move that doesn't work. There is some glass to break using reptile rush in these sewer areas. But I recently got the Sonar 'Splosion with which Laylee makes a massive sound wave. Seems like the perfect move to shatter some glass, right? But it doesn't work. Why not make the glass breakable in multiple ways? Or if you want to exclusively block the way with Reptile Rush, make it wood instead.
The long bit at 9:10 about characters doing cool stuff by just holding forwards put me in an existential crisis. Have all the cool thing I've liked in games just been "just holding forwards" moments? Oh god!
Finally, someone else that likes Yooka Laylee. Just played it for the second time in a row; really fun and refreshing game. Loved it. It's flawed, and even slightly downgraded from Banjo Tooie (honestly I missed the inter connectivity those worlds had) but still I had a lot of fun. Just wished there was more and I'll definitely back a sequel.
I remember Gex, I said a lot of swears playing that game, and was told "stop playing it if it's making you mad". To which I would respond "this game isn't going to beat me". I fucking hate Gex.
I'm playing Gex 3D at the moment, trying to clear my back catalogue of PSX games and I'm kind of amazed at the stuff they put into a game with a cartoon aesthetic. I had to look up who some of the celebrities he quips about are/were; as a kid in the benighted pre-internet era, I wouldn't have had a hope. Also, did they cut the "A little tongue now, a lot of tail later" bark from the N64 release, or are we just not talking about that?
10:49 This is the smoothest segue between two topics I've seen in ages. 11:36 It was only at this title card that I suddenly realized you had already shifted the conversation without me even noticing. I don't know how much of this is written beforehand but nicely done. Most Oddly Specifc Compliment Ever: disengaged.
I played a lot of collectathons back in the day, dropped off gaming entirely for a while, then came back again around 2017. Not having to do discrete movements in third person games was jarring, to say the least. The “hold forward” bit around 9:00 had me actually saying “YEP. YEP.” Out loud. (Also yes I recognize the fulfilling of leaving a comment on a 3 year old video, leave me alone)
I feel like Hbomb is comparing apples to oranges when he talks about assassin's creed and shadow of mordor. If they were strictly 3D platforming games, that comparison would be apt, but they're not. Assassin's creed, at its best is, essentially, a strategy game: You are to find a target, choose your approach, and then proceed and adapt accordingly based on how well you execute your plan, or how well thought out that plan was to begin with The platforming is just there to give you an option when it comes to assassination, but the climbing is not the centralized focus like it is in Yooka Laylee, so it does not need to be as complex in terms of control scheme. To demand that an Assassin's Creed or Shadow of Mordor game be as complex in their platforming as they are in their combat or action approaches is, frankly, asking way too much of a dev team, and would get you laughed out of any dev team meeting if you were to put that forward.
For me yookah-laylee missed the mark as a collectibles game. Half the quills are just strewn a bout, some are straight up hidden. These are supposed to be your main guide to places to visit. Collecting them in every out-of-the-way corner of the map isn't fun design. And not being able to collect some pagies because you need powers from later levels doesn't feel good either. You might as well just get the bare minimum to speedrun through the game to get all the powers just so you can collect them uninterrupted. I remember spending an ungodly amount of time in the frozen castle only to have to give up because I didn't know I didn't have the necessary power-up. And if you do this you'll have the flight power which pretty much invalidates all of the level designsof every level.
Ok so I'm watching this 6+ years later, but I got this game at launch. My first 3D platfortmer was Super Mario Sunshine... in 2004. I first played Banjo Kazooie when I had a broken arm at 13 years old. This was not a bad game for what it was. It DEFINITELY had its flaws. But it brought back that OUTDATED feeling of being a kid running through a 3D world. There's a reason we don't have Banjo-Threeie. It's because of the dislike of Yooka-Laylee. It proved why those nostalgic 3D platformers won't do well these days
The thing is, 3D platformers never really died, but instead evolved and improved. Yooka leyley just returned to the original formula and refused to take any of the improvements games like super Mario Galaxy, psychonauts, and sly Cooper added.
Am glad to hear I wasn't the only child that was extremely afraid of this game. I look back and laugh now but still remember dreading certain areas of the game, particular grunty's castle and the music that accompanied it.
I think its worth mentioning a point to your "Area Transitions" section. Perhaps it is only a personal perspective but I appreciate loading zones because they can help me realize my place in the world. Having discrete areas helps to let areas feel distinct without needing to blend them into each other in awkward ways. Its possible to do this without loading zones but such transitions make sure the developer and the player are on the same page. Being able to compartmentalize sections also helps me think about a space. I'm not into platformers the way I used to be and Yooka Laylee didn't change that for me, but I know when an area gets too large in a game that I can't hold it all comfortably in my consideration I get more frustrated. I play in a meticulous way and I enjoy being able to say "This area is done (for now)" before moving on to a new area. I think the platform genre died for a reason. People became jaded to the concept of exploring a 3D space. I attempted to replay Mario 64 and its barely more than a collection of test worlds compared to what came after. Later platformers like Banjo Kazooie and Jak and Daxter added better styles, visuals, characters and storylines in different ways and to different amounts but they still stuck to that basic "Isn't it cool to move in 3D" concept. There was (what felt like) a backlash to this when the concept became overused to the point that newer games downplayed verticality and removed the satisfaction of motion in favor of more cinematic movement as you pointed out. In some ways this was necessary to show we had moved on from the "Isn't it cool to move in 3D" concept, but perhaps it was not the only path available. Satisfying controls and an effort to fill your world with visually interesting and curiosity satisfying nuance is still incredibly important. It >IS STILL COOL TO MOVE IN 3D< but you just can't make a game about it and nothing else. That is where I feel Yooka Laylee went wrong. The game dialed back too far on the wayback machine for me and its using too many old concepts. It took the lessons learned from the old platformers and made a new version of what is still, in my eyes, a dead genre. It looked at its root without examining why those roots eventually withered and died, and it was afraid to do something truly new. Its a shame that this video is titled "What Modern Games Can Learn from Yooka-Laylee" and not something along the lines of how Yooka Laylee used the lessons of old platformers to make a new "modern" game that other devs can learn from as well. Its obvious from your video and the game itself (I played about.. 6 hours?) that the developers were quite aware of what made a good platformer and had learned all the lessons they could FROM THAT CONCEPT. The tragedy is that they didn't take the next step and use those lessons to make something new and innovative. They are leaving those lessons for some other developer to learn and capitalize on again, while living in their nostalgia castle on top of snark mountain.
"The temple is different inside, something only manageable with a transition" Not a direct quote, but whatever. It doesn't work that way. If you mess with the engine enough, it can be done, this was the idea behind the first project of the people who created Portal.
In cry engine you can easily do this, and it's actually called portals. Honestly this "quidditch tent" or "tardis" transition effect always really annoyed me in elder scrolls games. Walking into a hut in morrowind that on the outside was the size of a bedroll just for the interior to have 3 or 4 fit around a table with a person standing in some empty space to be really immersion breaking.
I CANT BELIEVE THIS. For YEARS of wondering if that "old suit-wearing gecko game" was a messed up dream I had when I was a little kid- only to see it in a random video. My life question finally answered. Thank you so much.
6:24 you don't actually need a level transition for this, you can use a non ecludian engine to "cheat" the space. There's a really good video showing this off
On one hand, those techniques do exist. On the other hand, it bugs me that people call them "non-Euclidean" when it's just clever teleportation. The only non-Euclidean game I've seen is Hyperbolica, and I've seen a _lot_ of videos supposedly about non-Euclidean games. Words have meanings-especially math and science words!
On the “holding forward isn’t gameplay” thing, the game Grow Home is by Ubisoft developers that worked on assassins creed and implements a much more complex and engaging movement system. WASD doesn’t just control your character, it aims both of your hands at nearby walls and let’s you use left and right click to grasp with each hand individually. They build the whole game around this free-form rock climbing mechanic and vertical movement. The game world consists of 3 islands, two of which are directly above the starting island, and tons of collectible crystals and interactive plants and animals. It gives you a fun movement system and a compelling reason to use it to get to new areas in new ways. I think the game shows that the Ubisoft team understands these design philosophies perfectly, but they have to put them aside to serve the wider appeal of the AAA games they make.
homunyan: Most games use loading screens as a crutch to support an engine not optimized for seemless loading, not for shortcuts that save on unnecessary travel time.
Pokemon Sun and Moon deserve their own analysis for what they do wrong and right. Like every batch of Pokemon games subsequent to the first set, it's two steps forward, one step back. The devs never carry over everything they ought to, and always try out things that don't really work. It's why it's hard for me to say what my favorite Pokemon game is. I do know it sure isn't Alpha Sapphire, which I FINALLY played a couple months ago (I was a broke student during the time it was fresh). It faithfully reproduces RS with only a few cool, but ultimately underwhelming cosmetic touch-ups. Soaring is cool, but underutilized. Mauville City looks very cool, but is a lot emptier than it should be. There's no Battle Frontier, and in general it's as if Emerald didn't exist at all. Sun and Moon has a number of virtues, and a number of aggravating flaws. Some of them are sort of the same. virtues 1. The story - while it could be a bit better, I really enjoyed them stretching themselves to do something more interesting. I also liked that the protagonist basically ends up being a supporting character in someone else's hero journey. 2. the cohesive region and culture 3. The new Pokemon design. I would argue it's the most consistently solid set of designs since the first, and I don't say this lightly. Mimikyu is a masterpiece in conception and execution. 4. Ditching gyms 5. follow-up to that - the Totem fights flaws 1. SOS battles. 2. the game melting down into a laggy mess when three or more Pokemon are on the field. or sometimes only with two. 3. the trials prior to the Totem fights are really uneven. I would say only the Fire and Ghost ones really come close to what I expected the trials to be when I first heard about them. I KNOW Nintendo can do better, and they should look to what they've done in past games. 4. The plot progression is a bit wonky - Aether probably should have been introduced a bit earlier, and Guzma as well. 5. The set of Pokemon available aside from the new ones is a bit disappointing. 6. some of the new Pokemon are quite rare and/or gated behind obnoxious mechanics. it feels a bit Gold/Silver in that regard.
The decline of platformers and the rise of the Microsoft turned me off of getting new video games for a very long time. Even now most of the new games I get are Mario games. I miss Crash and Spyro very much.
The original Xbox tried platformers. Even had a few satisfying ones like voodoo vince (got a HD remaster if it sounds interesting), but nobody played them, so they focused on Halo, gears of war etc. I don't think Microsoft is the reason of the sorry state of some game genres, but the people voting with their wallet.
putting "It's Tail Time" on my business card
Chez Lindsay yes.
"It's Tail Time" is approximately as funny as Rantasmo's "Important Homosexual" title on his business cards.
Chez Lindsay Fancy seeing you here!
Olly Roger
No
You're missing the point.
It really symbolizes someone who is comfortable in their own skin. Tail time has been warped to be a gross sexual phrase by these social studies femicommunisms. What this (presumably good christian boy) knows goes deeper than some petty fenminism, this boy knows the truth about the origin of the phrase. It was meant as an attack on the labor movement, i.e. "It's tail time for living wages." This Chad Lindbaum clearly means it as a nodwink to other waken genterlments in the buisimniss. So now you are the fool oliver now the fool is you!!
I ate the whole plate. The WHOLE plate.
Hey, man, I grew up on Gex. It didn't scar me for life. I don't rock back an forth muttering "a little tail now, a lotta tail later."
100 Gex
@@hannahbmbmbm Even Harriton Splimby can get behind a message like "stupid horse", after all, horses aren't real.
Note to self: Dont drink tap water at Jerry Garcia's
Anyone else still feel like they’re trapped in Boy George’s Pants?
(Omg I’ve never seen Gex brought up hahaha 😂)
Gex and its sequels rocked my world when I was 10, I still say "It's Tail Time" before being rejected by girls at my local pick up bar.
Aww man here we go again
What sort of crazy woman would reject someone so smooth?
It all comes back to Earthworm Jim.... thank you Tommy Tallarico for producing this entire video, I hope you get a new world record for most UA-cam videos ever worked on
His mother is VERY proud.
I love this comment
351 games worked on.
I heard that Hbomberguy told Tommy "Just make whatever sound effects you think are cool, and I'll make a video around them."
It's so cool he's the first American to ever help with an Hbomberguy video.
@@Strogman25 His mother is VERY proud.
I actually know what "It's Tail Time" means! I played the excellent "Gex" 2D platformer - the first in the series. It's a fantastic game with a lot of creative platforming and level design. You stick to walls, use your tongue to snap up power-up bugs and weird angles, and use the tail to attack enemies. Only your tail can damage enemies unless you have some sort of power up. You can attack with it like the castlevania whip in different angles, you can bounce off enemies by curling it up like a spring, etc.
"It's tail time" means, "It's time to kick some ass" because your tail is your weapon.
Dang, I'm actually a pro game designer now and I'm thinking about all those excellent level design elements and mechanics. I should play that game again! The acrobatic wall-crawling, tail-whipping, springing, gameplay made you feel so powerful and gave you so many ways to approach a lot of problems. Also Gex's gimmick was he was a movie/TV-obsessed gecko and he was sucked into the TV to play through various cinematic-genre-themed worlds. Horror, Comedy, etc.
thank you for explaining it
I only played the second Gex game on PS1 and it was so good and underrated, he just didn't control AS smooth as Crash or Spyro... Nothing did, Gex just got overshadowed by games that still blow any platformers out of water today.
I prefer to think to think that the gecko fucks
Serous Lore Analysis on Gex: Enter the Gecko when?
"So let's start by looking at this game through a Freudian critical lens. To aid in this, let's talk to an expert on Freudian theory, Dr Sigmund Freudian. Now Dr, how does this - "
*Sigmund Freudian holds up copybook open to page of penis graffiti*
smallseal17: lol
I'll love to see that. Especially if he goes deep in the game.
or deep cover gecko... could get reel deep into that one
It better be titled 'Does the Lizard Fuck?'
How can you bash Bomberman Hero when you're clearly named after it.
It's more likely Bomber Harris, given his apparent allegiance to the Anti-German tendency.
@@sunshinethuggery Do it again Bomber Harris! And in all seriousness it's probably because of his anti-fascism. After all, Bomber Harris did do a lot to stop fascism.
Actually it is bomberman. Just not bomberman hero
Oh I thought he just really liked hydrogen bombs
Bomberguy 64
This video is like drinking the tap water at jerry garcia’s
I have no idea what this comment is about but i DID like it anyways
@@hippityhoppityilikemypriva4467
its TAIL TIME
“This is like having The Kid’s Choice Awards at R. Kelly’ s house.”
Actual Gex quote.
I never understood what the hell this meant until I started going to music festivals.
@@ctons OH MY GOD 😂
What Modern Games Can Learn From Gex Enter the Gecko: "Add Tail Time into every game"
Add weird subtle sexual vibes.
Walks into an airport fully armed ‘remember it’s tail time’
Damn it's refreshing to see some positively for Yooka-Laylee. A lot of people bash it for being to archaic. Makes me wanna go back to it.
To be fair, I heard it was pretty unplayable before the patch because the physics made platforming incredibly poor. It is undeniably fun as it is now, and cheap (I got it for $7)
It wasn't just archaic it did everything worst than the games its inspired by. Which I think is its real issue, yea its irritating it didn't learn from the past and move the genre forward but that would have been acceptable if it had just done what the older games did really well. But it doesn't, the abilities are less interesting, the worlds are far more boring, the NPCs are copy pasted from world to world and make no sense in context, the challenges felt repetitive that fucking minecart shit is so fucking bad its unreal, in banjo kazooie that would have been in 1 maybe 2 worlds and it would have been themed to the area its in.
The game was just a mediocre nostalgic trip that managed to be worst than the things that came before it.
"If there's one thing JonTron is good at, it's making meaningless, incoherent noise into a microphone."
The delivery of that sick burn kills me every single time
The really funny thing is that Jon isn't even white; he's Persian. He thinks that he himself and his family shouldn't have a right to be where they are.
Bill Volk He apologized for saying stuff in that “debate” and he genuinely doesn’t believe the things he said there.
I have no idea wtf happened. Would someone mind explaining, or linking a video?
*Chada * watch destiny vs jontron debate.
@@sirlimen333 I dunno dude, he was kinda flirting with all that stuff before he came out and just straight up said it. It feels pretty disingenuous for him to back away from it. I'm all for genuine apologies and people growing, but this feels more like shrodingers dickhead, he got too much flak so he said he didn't mean it.
I think A Hat in Time proves that you don't even need to have area transitions in your levels if you just design your levels the right way. The closest thing I can think of to level transitions is Alpine Skyline, but there the transitions not only gives you a better idea of where you reside spatially in the area compared to the transitions in Yooka-Laylee, but also it's just rad to watch and feature some interactivity.
Also, not only does A Hat in Time not put eyes on things, sometimes they take eyes away from things that should have eyes.
I don't know if the missing eye thing makes it more terrifying or not...
There are mods that use them, Clockwork Cape being the best one that comes to mind. There's a lighthouse in the middle of the map that's huge on the inside.
@@Lyoko1309 ... tardis?
Eyes are not an unlimited resource, maybe there were just not enough left after banjo and Yooka horded them all?
The bit about games playing themselves for you is one of the things that always disappointed me about the Assassin's Creed games. Prince of Persia wasn't like that so it make it super satisfying when you pulled off a series of badass moves to navigate a space. I miss that sort of thing.
I like JRPGs and they tend to have a very go in a line, now fight an an enemy format, but I'm not sure if Assasin's Creed is supposed to be like that..It feels like it's meant to be more action-rpg , so I find it confusing that you can't do a lot of moves on your own....Especially with all the parkour stuff.
That's the difference between action adventure games and performers. Stop buying action adventures of you want platformers!
I dont even know why AC has to have platforming. The game should be about killing people.
@@zoltanz288 I feel like this is kind of the point - it doesn't have platforming.
I'm not the biggest fan of those games, but the actual thinking the player is expected to do is along the lines of avenues of approach, scouting enemy and target patrol routes, picking your moment.
I don't mind that e.g. Shadow of Mordor doesn't have intricate and satisfying platforming, because the game is about having total mastery of your environment and using it to beat overwhelming enemy forces through stealth or hit and run tactics. You're not meant to get satisfying gameplay out of climbing the fortress itself, the satisfaction comes from plotting takedowns or routes through crowded areas with stealth once atop said fortress, and executing on that plan.
@@SwedgeWoW AC definitely has some pure platforming sections. Not much but some and i really feel like they arent needed.
You can't convince me the "does the lizard fuck?" joke wasn't a John Oliver impression.
Hbomb's feelings towards Banjo Kazoie are my feelings towards Swiper the Fox, I do not know why, but the rest of the show? Wonderful, light hearted fun! But the bone chilling fear I felt when Swiper showed up? The sheer terror of loosing all the things we needed for our epic quests? My four year old self will never recover
I'm actually a prolific Gex the Gecko fan fiction artist, how dare you make light of the best game of February 28th, 1998.
Carya did you look that up for this comment?
No! Of course not! What kind of sane rational human gamer would I be if I didn't know the release date of Gex: Enter the Gecko, the best game of 12 AM February 28th, 1998?
Carya Um, everyone knows the best game of February 28th, 1998 was Battlezone.
That's a really weird way to find out I share the birthday of a masterpiece
It's tail time.
What the hell.
This editing is stunning.
Jack Ryan: It really is excellent. :0 Must be the money he made off of Johnny Skull Man. Or maybe he's just putting his film degree to good use, lol.
You say like there was any use to it.
how come everyone thinks good production value = good editing. Same goes for Casey neistat. In this case the cinematography is the key component
*ＩＴ＇Ｓ ＴＡＩＬ ＴＩＭＥ*
"I feel like I'm in Parliament/Funkadelic's dressing room."
I need an adult!
I feel like it's *ＴＡＩＬ ＴＩＭＥ.*
I Will Never Forgive Mr. Bomberguy For Mocking Gex
My childhood was defined by Gex, and everywhere I look, there's another video about 3D platformers saying "lol does anyone remember that trash garbage fire Gex hahaha."
Why do you hurt me?
Don't worry, I had the Dualshock Directer's Cut of Resident Evil 1. Hearing everyone rip the OST that gave me night terrors to absolute tatters makes me feel a little silly.
...why was your childhpod defined by Gex???
The original Gex was a fairly solid 2D platformer.
I like that your page is bigger than the book, very appropriate.
Oh I didn't even realise that was deliberate. I appreciate this so much more now
d e a t h o f t h e a u t h o r b o i s
I'm so glad you covered Gex. I completely forgot it existed and was about half sure I'd imagined it. I just had the faintest memories of a James Bond game except you're a lizard.
It was one my favorite games of my childhood, minus the difficult controls and annoying catchphrases.
Payton Quinn i hate dunkey now
Gecko*
Dommer4kill: DX Geckos are lizards.
I remember playing Gex 3 a lot as a kid. The line about 'Does he have sex?' and 'it's tail time!' are definitely knowing. I've not played the older games but in this one Playboy model Marliece Andrada appears in FMV with Gex making all these innuendos about her and at the end it's heavily implied they both do it.
You know, if there was a sequel JonTron could play a polar bear called Eugene Ice. He spends all day in his igloo angry about how all the brown bears are somehow killing off the polar bears by dating his highschool crush, and the entire mission could be about your melting his home so he can finally move on with his life.
This is one of the best puns I've heard in ages.
+Shammy, I know you! Night in the wood and life is strange reviews were good.
Mees Banning stop saying "genocide" because that's so fucking hyperbolic lmao
Playtonic, please hire me.
The fuck does "cultural genocide" mean? Genocide means forcing a certain group of people to die out. If you think your culture will die out, i gotta ask how. Also, what does that mean? What exactly are you scared of? That people will stop celebrating christmas? That people will stop having barbeques? That kind of thing will never happen. And even if it does happen, who gives a toss? As long as we have laws and values that protect people from injustices, who cares what traditions we celebrate?
12:06 Actually the 3d platformer didn't go away "for a reason", it was slowly eroded as the simplification of controls happened. Uncharted is supposed to be a successor to Tomb Raider, and Assassin's Creed is supposed to be a successor to Prince of Persia - and they kinda are, if you remove all the actual platforming that used to be there.
Banjo kazooie and successors are clearly 3D jump and runs though and those are alive and well.
Ever heard of a hat in time or.. oh I don't know, super Mario Odyssey?
Miles Miles In defense of Hbomb, he said “other than Mario” and Super Mario Odyssey was not out at the time of the video. Also it should be said that games like Yooka laylee and Hat In Time were made primarily BECAUSE the 3D platformer had mostly disappeared.
@@4203105 In addition to hat in time and yooka being made to fill the hunger in lack of 3D platformers they were also made by small crowdfunded studios, while in the past you had Naughty Dog (Crash, Spyro), Sony's Japan Studio (Ape Escape), Ubisoft (Rayman, Tonic Trouble) and even Microsoft had their attempt at the genre with Blinx.
Nowadays it's mostly Nintendo and small indies who do 3D platformers and for Nintendo it's generally very infrequent releases with 3D Marios (4 years between 3D world and Odyssey. 2 years since Odyssey's release there's not been any tease or announcement for a new game either, so probably will be 4 years between Odyssey and next one too). Sony did they try with Knack and Knack 2, but they're closer to beat em ups than 3D platformers. There's more focus on simplistic fighting with a lot of projectiles, while platforming is more a side thing.
I love Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds) because it shares Actual Level Design and Purposeful Controls.
The 3d collectathon absolutely went away for a reason. Without the nostalgia so many have there are really only a few worth playing and like commenters above me said the last bastions of the format are mario and indie games.
1000000% I remember "It's tail time" XD I can't remember which Gex game it came from but the phrase I really remember is "I feel like I'm trapped in Boy George's pants"
To this day because of Jak and Dexter's shark I'm scared of swimming in any video game. I'm not even joking
This is too real for me
Stop this
Same, but for the massive fucking tentacle that shoots out of the water if you swim too far in Jak 3.
For me it was Ratchet and Clank.
this is but 1 of many games that has given me a terror for swimming in any
The worst is when they have dark underwater bits where you can only see a little bit in front of you. Even when I know there are no enemies still makes me want to want to pull my hair out.
Where is the five hour video on how bad Fallout 4 is. Come on HBomb.
Swamp Cleaner: Communists like Hbomb and I are currently waging war on the capitalists. SORRY IF THAT MEANS YOU DON'T GET YOUR FALLOUT VIDEOS ASAP YOU DAMN BOURGEOIS PUPPET
tl;dr it'll get here sometime soon. Tell him to put it in a twitter poll, lol
Mind-Forged Manacles Hey, I completely support his war against the capitalist and he could incorporate that into the review.
how it would be any different from his fo3 vid? fo4 is as shit as fo3. nothing more to be said.
Five hours? Make it ten.
Swamp Cleaner Hbomb cannot defeat Joseph Anderson.
The LED on your XBox 360 controller wasn't lit! You're a fake gamer! Where are your bees? #harrisbomberguybusted
László Szerémi #WHERESANITASBEES
capital B took anitasbees!
Best comment
I’m just going to go ahead and say it: it’s tail time
How did you know what I was thinking?
I know I'm pretty late to the party, but as someone who was addicted to collectathon's from the early 90's, and who actually 100%-ed all 3D Super Marios, Banjo 1, 2, Conker and now Yooka Laylee, I still must admit... Yooka Laylee is very, VERY shoddy and flawed. Six more months of polish and this could have been a truly great game. As it stands, it's worth playing through, but definitely nothing to write panegyrics about.
did hbomber's production quality triple since the last time I watched him?
Tangy ™: He's letting Kevin Owen handle the editing for him.
Tangy ™ Don't you mean Jordan Owen?
He's JonTroning. Fuck.
Alan Smithee: I was drunk last night, I'm surprised I got one of his names correct, lol
Mind-Forged Manacles Hehe fair enough man
This isn't my kind of game, but you bring up a good point with the trend AssCreed has set for climbing controls. It's a shame because Ubisoft made Prince of Persia once upon a time, and it was awesome. It effectively married a realistic aesthetic to genuinely challenging gameplay.
I understand that AssCreed's climbing mechanics were originally intended to allow the player to use acrobatics in a variety of situations, since it's an open world game. But games like Uncharted seem to have mistook the ease with which the climbing works as an end in and of itself; there is no reason to use an automated system like that in a linear game.
I think modern games as a whole have a hard time distinguishing between convenience and fun.
Isaac Taylor uncharted actually released before assassins creed
Let me just stick all my climbing shit on for a minute I like the movements in Uncharted and even a few AC animations for the climbing but what bugs me is they don't stress how fucking tiring it can be, it would honestly be incredible for Nate to have to take a breather after scaling some of that shit
Ubisofts Prince of Persia actually doesn't have challenging climbing, the only time I ever died climbing was from accidental jumps or checking to see if ledges were grab-able as it wasn't always clearly visible or communicated, and smoothing out those accidental jumps is really the only thing that the automation effectively changes, the only thing challenging about PoP's acrobatics and climbing was timing to avoid the traps, which was a part of PoP's gameplay and not really with Uncharted, though the entire game is actually no harder than Uncharted honestly, maybe easier due to rewinding. Both games would benefit from being more challenging I think.
Because comparing an action adventure game to a jump and run is totally fair or even rational.
But I'm sure in the N64 era everything was different... Oh what's that, Link is climbing those whines and jumping those ledges in ocarina of time just by you holding forward!? Well I'll be monkeys uncle!
The idea for Assassin's Creed's climbing was the same as say, Driving in GTA.
Like, GTA's driving wasn't as mechanically demanding as say Gran Turismo's but it facitilated chases, exploration, stunts, drive bys etc. In other words, it wasn't doing the thing that was the challenge, it was applying it.
AC works the same way. The climbing there is meant to allow you to navigate, sneak around and explore all seamlessly without seperate controls for each. It does mean indivudal applications like linear tombs suffer but it does allow convient choices when approaches are more open ended.
Hi Hbomb- regarding the level transitions and breaking up levels- even with modern computers this can still be necessary because the assets of the game are much higher quality so the textures and models still fill memory with potentially just the same sized areas. It's probably improved now but also in Unity streaming zones aren't really built-in so it's not trival to do with that engine (there probably is some pretty good middleware for it though) Great video overall, just wanted to mention this particular point
This is what I hate about computers. Every time the hardware gets faster, instead of the software getting faster, the software gets more complex and remains just as slow or will be even slower, because people are more patient when they think about all the features and the fact that professionals NEED to use modern software.
It took a second to turn on a C64. Now I have to wait a minute for Windows to boot. The games have the same load time on C64 and today's PC, except their graphics are better now. There is one difference though: in the time of C64, programmers achieved feats in coding trying to get more graphics and more sound out of the same hardware. Is anyone still doing that today? Is anyone trying to write more efficient code to make an open wolrd RPG run even with 4 GB RAM instead of 8? Is there anyone writing more efficient code, so that I don't have to buy a more expensive GPU? Is anyone doing that? Or is everyone just content that they can write the slowest piece of shit, and in worst case they just wait a couple of years while the hardware is getting exponentially faster?
Developers are getting worse about this too- Mafia 3 basically shipped with 30 fps lock and you would get around that speed on even fairly decent modern computers. They patched but it was still fairly much a dog performance-wise
@@algi1
For consoles specificaly, No. Developers tend to write more efficient code and the benfits of faster data streaming are apparent.
Let's consider an example, in GTA SA back on the PS2, interiors load seperatly and fast travel is also loaded taking up to 10 seconds at times to fully load. GTA V on just the PS3 was able to have multiple load points compress down to 5 seconds.
Since most PC games tend to be ports of console games, they mostly tend to benefit at least indirectly from this
@@algi1 hoo boy 3 year old comment - i hope you've got a better PC by now
anyway, you said it yourself - why spend time, money and energy on making optimizations for hardware a small subset of your customer base owns, when you can just throw more processing power at it? software engineering is a series of compromises, and adding features and content will almost always take precedence to wringing out more performance on lower-end hardware, unless you're working on embedded systems i guess.
you can still find people who will try to squeeze every last drop out of an aging system, but it's important to acknowledge they're doing it for the fun of it, not for a professional outcome, and that it's building on the knowledge of almost 40 years of experience. there's just no point in doing the same to modern systems when the next year's CPU will blow the performance out of the water.
I've been saying for years: STOP pushing the textures and models so hard. Use the advancing tech to make the levels blend together more. I assume it hasn't happened because it's still extremely difficult and expensive, but is it impossible? If we stayed in Early 2006 graphics, would we have larger levels? You seem like you might know.
I was really surprised how much of the level design I remembered when I played through the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro remakes. Quality stuff!
Rewatching this made me realise that the Googly Eyes enemy secretly did the thing that Mario did in his new game.
Hbomberguy made history, becoming the first youtuber to talk about yooka-laylee in a positive context, even going so far as to betray his communist overlord Jim Sterling
*comulist
There have been a few other positive reviews but they really are few and far between. It's sad to see such a great game be hated so much.
the "issue" with this game is that it's just banjo kazooie: another one. It's a retro platformer with little done to modernize it, and that has a polarizing effect on players.
I think you'll find you meant commulist.
I thought he was a Fascist.
I'm really glad someone has stepped up to the plate to defend this games upsides. I haven't played this game so far but I spent my youth playing banjo and was really excited about its release, and when everyone began bashing it I directly assumed it was a 4/10 game and thus not worth the money. I think now that you have provided a counter argument to other reviews I can safely make a choice on my purchase. Thank you.
Know = now
so did you like it?
@@zoltanz288 yeah did he
@@jacobprout5097 did you
@@turtleanton6539
I enjoyed it quite a bit :D
I do remember Bomberman Hero, in the way that some remember Vietnam.
That's rough buddy
I got Yooka-Lele when it came out. I was working at GameStop at the time, one of my co-workers actually is on the credits because he donated to the crowdfunding campaign. I was too exhausted from work to ever get around to playing it, and the years after that had not been kind to me as after a number of violent episodes I finally started doing the work of digging all the shit out of my brain from childhood. Today I was thinking about maybe playing a new game, because in the last decade I've mostly just played games I already know.
I think its time to catch up with all the things I wanted to be joyful about in my life.
I hope you're doing better now!
@@ggs27 thank you, I am doing my best! I'm having more good days, less terrible ones, and I did finally play some of the games I'd been meaning to! Yay for the little victories ✨
Wait ... You talk about horrifying things in Banjo Kazooie and you forget to mention the first time you encounter Clanker?!
Recht_voor_zijn_raap even naar dennis sturen
The only thing wrong with Playtonic is they've had the FF8 OST stuck on "Eyes on Me" for about 3 years straight.
Melo Dotty that ain't wrong that's right
Hey, I remember Bomberman Hero very well! It had clowns on beach balls that threw knives at you.
Bomberman Hero
Hero Bomberman
H. Bomberman
Wew
Those shits were fucking horryfying. Bomberman Hero is my personal Silent Hill, that game is just scary as shit.
It seems to be a thing in Japanese media? Super Mario RPG has a boss that's a clown on a beach ball. He doesn't throw knives, but his partner (who stands on his head at some point to attack you) does.
I remember the Earth Worm Jim game. I even beat it.
@@ldskjfhslkjdhflkjdhf wow
Is Yooka-Laylee Cultural Marxist? If so, I GOTTA GO PLAY IT NOW!
that's really cool, but unfortunately it's just not a good game. The controls are awful, it's slippery and weird.
the real evolution of Hbomb is going from "What is Gex?" to "GEX GEX GEX GEX GEX"
I loved the bit about area transitions here!!
"Does the lizard fuck?" Thanks H, you gave me the perfect gif to describe my novel about dragons.
You've been blinded by the pretty colors and numerous eyes of the Yooka-Laylee world, Hbomb. Collecting pages? This, truly, is the most intricate Slender clone I've seen yet. (I'm JOKING.)
As for game maps, I get what you're saying--that moment you captured in your Fallout 3 video where the gamers completely missed the GIANT ROBOT really sticks out to me--but as someone with... questionable spatial-mapping abilities, I personally appreciate a map, especially in more modern games, with their more expansive landscapes and settings.
Eleanor Vance
that Fallout 3 video is pretty long. At what point in the video does he talk about the robot? I'm curious about finding that momtent.
His discussion of the mechanic that caused missing the robot starts about 22:24 or so, and then I believe that particular section is a few minutes long at most. Enjoy!
I just realized that I may have responded to my own comment and not yours, so here's hoping this shows up on your feed. (If it already did, just ignore it, my bad!)
Hey I'm two years late to this party, but I think Hbomber's main complaint isn't necessarily the presence of a map, but more of Objective markers that tell you where to go, and possibly a minimap. If you ever played Morrowind, the third elder scrolls game, it has a map; this map has fog of war and basically only symbols for some fairly major points of interest that you'd need to visit multiple times, also the fast travel is weird and more like a public transit system, and you can only do it from weird giant bugs. There also are no objective markers-directions to locations are given with literal text directions put in your in game journal: including shit like TAKE A LEFT AT THE YELLOW FLOWER BY THE LAKE, I shit you not. Later elder scrolls games removed the exploration that morrowind encouraged by just giving you a marker and live tracker on where you need to go, which generally removes the just looking at the world that occured more in morrowind (ironic given that looking back that game kinda looks like dogshit). The presence of objective markers and an omniscient minimap remove the need to explore at all. Games like morrowind had markers, but not many, and only when you opened your map. Finding things was a sort of game inside the game, and the loss of that has replaced fun (and admittedly frustration) with boring convenience that removes you from the experience
@@hellomynameisCECIL Okay almost a year late to you but, as someone who couldn't navigate their way out of a paper bag, a mini-map and objective markers actually encourage exploration. With objective markers I can go out and about exploring everywhere and not worry about having to find wherever I started at so the directions will be useful. I like to explore just for explorations' sake, not because of a "need"; map markers are really just assurance that I'll be able to get to a place when I want to. So, I will would like the option of having a mini-map and quest markers. (the operative word being option)
Another great video from James Somerton!
yookalaylee died so a hat in time could thrive
I think, because Gex uses his tail as a weapon, and he keeps teleporting into dangerous environments, “it’s tail time” means “it’s clobberin’ time.” Or, you know, “it’s time to kick some ass,” or something like that. But hell yeah, I remember Gex! I had all 3 of those games, even though only the second one was really good. But in all three, Gex was voiced by stand up comedian Dana Gould, who I was a huge fan of.
"It's time to kick ass!", expressed as a statement about one's ass.
You mentioned From Software in your first point (area transitions), and that brought them to the fore of my mind on all the rest. Soulsborne games draw substantially from Forgotten Secret Game Techniques 2 through 4. There's no automatic jumping to navigate treacherous terrain; generally each action you take corresponds to a button press, and your success is dependent on pressing the right buttons at the right time. There's no minimap, since you're expected to remember your location in the level. And of course, plenty of eyes. (okay the final one is mostly just bloodborne).
How do you have the american version of Gex? The voice actor for Gex in the UK version is soooooooo much better.
I remember Gex
You should check out a Hat in Time. Then make a video on it for me to consume and enjoy in a slack-jawed stupor.
Yes, I do remember Bomberman Hero, and I loved that so much that the soundtrack is playing on loop throughout the rest of the video while you talk.
This song especially, I bet! ua-cam.com/video/tCcRr9vFrGA/v-deo.html
My local college radio station actually played this track recently!
I remember only bits and pieces of the game in a bizarre nightmare hellscape sort of way. Game was uncanny as hell.
Saying "nobody remembers Gex" has aged horribly now that Scott the Woz exists
With 20+ years of hindsight, I can say that Banjo Tooie was probably my favorite game of all n64. I was bummed by Yooka Laylee because it was indie devs from my childhood, with Grant Kirhope AND they used Unity, which I was getting into at the time. I wanted it to be a home run, but I was kinda disappointed.
Here's what I think B-T did well that Y-L did not (at least what comes to mind immediately):
-There are few, very large, levels in Y-L. Not inherently bad, but that means you're only limited to 5 themes in the whole game. So you get mismatched characters like the Hamelot pigs in the casino and... space? Why not make a medieval world? That would have been super cool! But I believe the answer is that it takes less time to make one massive level with themed assets than it takes to make two smaller worlds and make different themed assets for each.
-On a similar note, only 5 levels means only 5 transformations :(
-The arcade games are atrocious. B-T's aren't great but they can be occasionally fun. I don't care how meta Rex is trying to be about old games, they are truly awful.
-Honey lets you stick to ramped surfaces. That's clever! But you use it to go up an icy ramp? Somehow ice doesn't feel like something honey would properly stick on. IDK why this one bothered me especially.
-Some puzzles need to be solved with a move, but they APPEAR to be solvable with another move that doesn't work. There is some glass to break using reptile rush in these sewer areas. But I recently got the Sonar 'Splosion with which Laylee makes a massive sound wave. Seems like the perfect move to shatter some glass, right? But it doesn't work. Why not make the glass breakable in multiple ways? Or if you want to exclusively block the way with Reptile Rush, make it wood instead.
He doesn't like Gex, but more people like Gex than Yooka-Laylee. Must be the commulism.
I think it's just that Gex game, not Gex itself.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who actually enjoyed Yooka-Laylee, if only because it took me back to old school stupid Rare fun.
The long bit at 9:10 about characters doing cool stuff by just holding forwards put me in an existential crisis. Have all the cool thing I've liked in games just been "just holding forwards" moments? Oh god!
Glad it's up again
Finally, someone else that likes Yooka Laylee. Just played it for the second time in a row; really fun and refreshing game. Loved it. It's flawed, and even slightly downgraded from Banjo Tooie (honestly I missed the inter connectivity those worlds had) but still I had a lot of fun. Just wished there was more and I'll definitely back a sequel.
I remember Gex, I said a lot of swears playing that game, and was told "stop playing it if it's making you mad". To which I would respond "this game isn't going to beat me".
I fucking hate Gex.
I'm playing Gex 3D at the moment, trying to clear my back catalogue of PSX games and I'm kind of amazed at the stuff they put into a game with a cartoon aesthetic. I had to look up who some of the celebrities he quips about are/were; as a kid in the benighted pre-internet era, I wouldn't have had a hope.
Also, did they cut the "A little tongue now, a lot of tail later" bark from the N64 release, or are we just not talking about that?
10:49 This is the smoothest segue between two topics I've seen in ages. 11:36 It was only at this title card that I suddenly realized you had already shifted the conversation without me even noticing. I don't know how much of this is written beforehand but nicely done. Most Oddly Specifc Compliment Ever: disengaged.
I played a lot of collectathons back in the day, dropped off gaming entirely for a while, then came back again around 2017. Not having to do discrete movements in third person games was jarring, to say the least. The “hold forward” bit around 9:00 had me actually saying “YEP. YEP.” Out loud. (Also yes I recognize the fulfilling of leaving a comment on a 3 year old video, leave me alone)
I feel like Hbomb is comparing apples to oranges when he talks about assassin's creed and shadow of mordor. If they were strictly 3D platforming games, that comparison would be apt, but they're not. Assassin's creed, at its best is, essentially, a strategy game: You are to find a target, choose your approach, and then proceed and adapt accordingly based on how well you execute your plan, or how well thought out that plan was to begin with
The platforming is just there to give you an option when it comes to assassination, but the climbing is not the centralized focus like it is in Yooka Laylee, so it does not need to be as complex in terms of control scheme.
To demand that an Assassin's Creed or Shadow of Mordor game be as complex in their platforming as they are in their combat or action approaches is, frankly, asking way too much of a dev team, and would get you laughed out of any dev team meeting if you were to put that forward.
Hmm Shadow of Morder sequal video in the H Bomber Guy's expanded universe?
I actually do remember Gex. Me and my dad used to play it when I was a kid and loved it
For me yookah-laylee missed the mark as a collectibles game. Half the quills are just strewn a bout, some are straight up hidden. These are supposed to be your main guide to places to visit. Collecting them in every out-of-the-way corner of the map isn't fun design.
And not being able to collect some pagies because you need powers from later levels doesn't feel good either. You might as well just get the bare minimum to speedrun through the game to get all the powers just so you can collect them uninterrupted. I remember spending an ungodly amount of time in the frozen castle only to have to give up because I didn't know I didn't have the necessary power-up. And if you do this you'll have the flight power which pretty much invalidates all of the level designsof every level.
0:37 Holy shit look at that cinematic quality!!
Clearly you haven't heard of Gextra Life; the annual charity stream.
O shit that’s a real thing
Stop sending me notifications HARRIS BOMBER GUY
Mind-Forged Manacles actually don't
I'm still amazed by how well Banjo-Kazooie has aged.
Ok so I'm watching this 6+ years later, but I got this game at launch.
My first 3D platfortmer was Super Mario Sunshine... in 2004. I first played Banjo Kazooie when I had a broken arm at 13 years old.
This was not a bad game for what it was. It DEFINITELY had its flaws. But it brought back that OUTDATED feeling of being a kid running through a 3D world.
There's a reason we don't have Banjo-Threeie. It's because of the dislike of Yooka-Laylee. It proved why those nostalgic 3D platformers won't do well these days
The thing is, 3D platformers never really died, but instead evolved and improved. Yooka leyley just returned to the original formula and refused to take any of the improvements games like super Mario Galaxy, psychonauts, and sly Cooper added.
Your's and Mark Brown's game analysis videos are my favourites :)
"To the victors belong the spoils" is an Andrew Jackson quote. Why is that in Yooka-Laylee?!?!?!
Edit: Oh that's why
can you explain what you mean
I'll have you know that Gex is my 4th favourite 3d platformer.
This video screams with nostalgia goggles firmly taped to to your eyes.
Am glad to hear I wasn't the only child that was extremely afraid of this game. I look back and laugh now but still remember dreading certain areas of the game, particular grunty's castle and the music that accompanied it.
No one could forget Bomberman Hero's Redial music.
I think its worth mentioning a point to your "Area Transitions" section. Perhaps it is only a personal perspective but I appreciate loading zones because they can help me realize my place in the world. Having discrete areas helps to let areas feel distinct without needing to blend them into each other in awkward ways. Its possible to do this without loading zones but such transitions make sure the developer and the player are on the same page.
Being able to compartmentalize sections also helps me think about a space. I'm not into platformers the way I used to be and Yooka Laylee didn't change that for me, but I know when an area gets too large in a game that I can't hold it all comfortably in my consideration I get more frustrated. I play in a meticulous way and I enjoy being able to say "This area is done (for now)" before moving on to a new area.
I think the platform genre died for a reason. People became jaded to the concept of exploring a 3D space. I attempted to replay Mario 64 and its barely more than a collection of test worlds compared to what came after. Later platformers like Banjo Kazooie and Jak and Daxter added better styles, visuals, characters and storylines in different ways and to different amounts but they still stuck to that basic "Isn't it cool to move in 3D" concept.
There was (what felt like) a backlash to this when the concept became overused to the point that newer games downplayed verticality and removed the satisfaction of motion in favor of more cinematic movement as you pointed out. In some ways this was necessary to show we had moved on from the "Isn't it cool to move in 3D" concept, but perhaps it was not the only path available. Satisfying controls and an effort to fill your world with visually interesting and curiosity satisfying nuance is still incredibly important. It >IS STILL COOL TO MOVE IN 3D< but you just can't make a game about it and nothing else.
That is where I feel Yooka Laylee went wrong. The game dialed back too far on the wayback machine for me and its using too many old concepts. It took the lessons learned from the old platformers and made a new version of what is still, in my eyes, a dead genre. It looked at its root without examining why those roots eventually withered and died, and it was afraid to do something truly new.
Its a shame that this video is titled "What Modern Games Can Learn from Yooka-Laylee" and not something along the lines of how Yooka Laylee used the lessons of old platformers to make a new "modern" game that other devs can learn from as well. Its obvious from your video and the game itself (I played about.. 6 hours?) that the developers were quite aware of what made a good platformer and had learned all the lessons they could FROM THAT CONCEPT. The tragedy is that they didn't take the next step and use those lessons to make something new and innovative. They are leaving those lessons for some other developer to learn and capitalize on again, while living in their nostalgia castle on top of snark mountain.
This reminds me of all the fun things about Rayman 2.
"The temple is different inside, something only manageable with a transition"
Not a direct quote, but whatever. It doesn't work that way. If you mess with the engine enough, it can be done, this was the idea behind the first project of the people who created Portal.
In cry engine you can easily do this, and it's actually called portals. Honestly this "quidditch tent" or "tardis" transition effect always really annoyed me in elder scrolls games. Walking into a hut in morrowind that on the outside was the size of a bedroll just for the interior to have 3 or 4 fit around a table with a person standing in some empty space to be really immersion breaking.
you're quickly becoming one of my favorite channels on UA-cam. Really changing how i think about games, shows and even logic. thanks for that.
I CANT BELIEVE THIS. For YEARS of wondering if that "old suit-wearing gecko game" was a messed up dream I had when I was a little kid- only to see it in a random video. My life question finally answered. Thank you so much.
6:24 you don't actually need a level transition for this, you can use a non ecludian engine to "cheat" the space. There's a really good video showing this off
On one hand, those techniques do exist. On the other hand, it bugs me that people call them "non-Euclidean" when it's just clever teleportation. The only non-Euclidean game I've seen is Hyperbolica, and I've seen a _lot_ of videos supposedly about non-Euclidean games. Words have meanings-especially math and science words!
Note to self, don’t drink tap water at jerry gracia’s
-gex
"This looks really cool right?" *cuts to the game I'm playing literally right now XD
Glad to see this video back up finally.
On the “holding forward isn’t gameplay” thing, the game Grow Home is by Ubisoft developers that worked on assassins creed and implements a much more complex and engaging movement system. WASD doesn’t just control your character, it aims both of your hands at nearby walls and let’s you use left and right click to grasp with each hand individually. They build the whole game around this free-form rock climbing mechanic and vertical movement. The game world consists of 3 islands, two of which are directly above the starting island, and tons of collectible crystals and interactive plants and animals. It gives you a fun movement system and a compelling reason to use it to get to new areas in new ways. I think the game shows that the Ubisoft team understands these design philosophies perfectly, but they have to put them aside to serve the wider appeal of the AAA games they make.
HAHAHA, this video feels like something John Oliver would do, that's how good it is.
That bad, huh
Umm, yeah I don’t think that’s much of a compliment.
10:31 "And that's not always a good thing"
That's why it's not in every game released nowdays
Is it just me or are you getting more cinematic and artsy in your camera work, no more 'sit in room look at camera doing funny thing' i aprove
"Who remembers Gex?"
Scott the Woz and his friends: *please allow us to introduce ourselves*
> Does anybody remember Gex Enter The Gecko
Are you trying to insult my childhood favourite platformer franchise?
Lots of games still have loading screens and pokemon sun and moon already did EXACTLY the same mountain shortcut trick multiple times.
homunyan: Most games use loading screens as a crutch to support an engine not optimized for seemless loading, not for shortcuts that save on unnecessary travel time.
Pokemon Sun and Moon deserve their own analysis for what they do wrong and right. Like every batch of Pokemon games subsequent to the first set, it's two steps forward, one step back. The devs never carry over everything they ought to, and always try out things that don't really work. It's why it's hard for me to say what my favorite Pokemon game is.
I do know it sure isn't Alpha Sapphire, which I FINALLY played a couple months ago (I was a broke student during the time it was fresh). It faithfully reproduces RS with only a few cool, but ultimately underwhelming cosmetic touch-ups. Soaring is cool, but underutilized. Mauville City looks very cool, but is a lot emptier than it should be. There's no Battle Frontier, and in general it's as if Emerald didn't exist at all.
Sun and Moon has a number of virtues, and a number of aggravating flaws. Some of them are sort of the same.
virtues
1. The story - while it could be a bit better, I really enjoyed them stretching themselves to do something more interesting. I also liked that the protagonist basically ends up being a supporting character in someone else's hero journey.
2. the cohesive region and culture
3. The new Pokemon design. I would argue it's the most consistently solid set of designs since the first, and I don't say this lightly. Mimikyu is a masterpiece in conception and execution.
4. Ditching gyms
5. follow-up to that - the Totem fights
flaws
1. SOS battles.
2. the game melting down into a laggy mess when three or more Pokemon are on the field. or sometimes only with two.
3. the trials prior to the Totem fights are really uneven. I would say only the Fire and Ghost ones really come close to what I expected the trials to be when I first heard about them. I KNOW Nintendo can do better, and they should look to what they've done in past games.
4. The plot progression is a bit wonky - Aether probably should have been introduced a bit earlier, and Guzma as well.
5. The set of Pokemon available aside from the new ones is a bit disappointing.
6. some of the new Pokemon are quite rare and/or gated behind obnoxious mechanics. it feels a bit Gold/Silver in that regard.
Ooohhh you are spoiling me Hbomber, my birthday is tomorrow and now I got an early present. Thank you!
The decline of platformers and the rise of the Microsoft turned me off of getting new video games for a very long time. Even now most of the new games I get are Mario games. I miss Crash and Spyro very much.
Good news for you. The entire PS1 Crash games are being remastered. They come out in June on PS4 if those are your cup of tea. Have a nice day. :)
The original Xbox tried platformers. Even had a few satisfying ones like voodoo vince (got a HD remaster if it sounds interesting), but nobody played them, so they focused on Halo, gears of war etc. I don't think Microsoft is the reason of the sorry state of some game genres, but the people voting with their wallet.
this guys videos are ridiculously well done
0:10 I have finally discovered what other static object jump scared Hbomb from his Pathologic video