"And on the seventh day, the Lord's mic broke. And then the Lord rested until the store sent him a new one, since he had a 10 day warranty." -Old Testiment, Technical 4-04
You know how in most QTE games, the prompts are somewhat relevant to the action that the character is supposed to take? Like pressing left to dodge to the left or something? Apparently the team behind Strahl didn't know that.
To be fair, apparently there are no good 3DO emulators out there, and somehow the button prompts became wildly out of sync with the video. It's not really the developers' fault.
To be fair, the crap that's going on in the video isn't actually the 3DO's fault. It's just that there is literally no good 3DO emulator out there. Seriously. Neither of the two I tried can even run _Super Street Fighter II Turbo_ decently, so what hope could there be for a game that uses sprite resizing between FMV clips? The incredibly desynced input notifications may also be because of that, but I don't know for sure. It might have been smarter to longplay the Saturn version, or even better, the Pioneer LaserActive version (via capture card?) called _Triad Stone_.
Yes, I'm pretty sure the input desynchs are due to the emulator too, all coming more slowly than they should and falling way behind the FMV, just as the intro story animations finish faster than they should and cut off the narrator. You can find a few longplays done on console where the inputs make sense and don't go all to the way to when Alex has passed all the danger. (The emulator I tried also makes the input notifications flicker, but this might not be possible to see on UA-cam due to its lower maximum framerate.) Triad Stone does have the more logical story from what I've seen. The downside is you don't get all those crazy endings Strahl has, but that aspect can't be conveyed in a single longplay anyway, unless you want to dedicate two-thirds of the video to an ending collection. And just how many people ever invested in a Mega-LD setup? It's just a shame the Saturn version doesn't seem to be available in English and leaves out some between-level animations.
What if this game is about Alex metaphorically finding god and battling his depression and low self esteem? I just have the feeling that this is what it's about.
The stage you picked first chose your "path", air, land, or water. Which would affect the fun facts, then the order you played the other stages in made VERY minor changes to the ending cutscene.
My mind was reciting a mantra of "He's getting the crystals, he's getting the crystals" as I tried to fill in a reason for everything happening. Just trying to rationalize all the constant and different events. I think my mind was hiding my confusion, even now, as I rewatch this one again.
I really like this anime story of Santa Claus and his quest to collect the mystical Easter eggs for his good friend, the Easter Bunny. I'd name this game "Weihnachtsmann: Intergalactic Warrior of the Pompadour." (it's especially awesome that apparently that German name for Santa translates to "Holy-Night-Man".)
Considering the gameplay of these types of games is so easy to make, you would think they could at least make the input commands fit the action the protagonist is doing.....you know, it isn't that hard.
Having watched this a few times, I think the problem is the QTE inputs and the actual on-screen actions are *way* out of sync, so you end up reacting to QTE's that should have appeared earlier.
Thomas Jenkins That's...a good point; Still, it's weird how the first thing the guy does, dodging, has its command slightly afterwards, and nothing happens before that, then the second event shows a long meter and he takes a while to do it.
Why is it the crystals were different colors in the beginning, but then every time Strahl got one, they were the same cyan-ish color? Also, what happens if you miss the command to pick up the crystal? Does Strahl trip and die?
+HW W This game replaces the original level endings with stock footage from the first level to pretend there are more stones, and that command was actually from an earlier event due to an emulation error.
After we did this video, I learned the Mega CD version is longer, so maybe it makes more sense? Some graphics (Strahl/Eric looking over the desert) look new to the game too... maybe it was adapted from an anime?
I don't think it would depend entirely on the order, though: You get a choice of 3 at the start, then you do the other 5 in any order and leave only the crystal-cave mirror-clone level for last, so I believe that would be three times five factorial or 360 permutations. The manual mentions you get 2 continues and 3 lives per continue, making 9 possibilities for lives lost; maybe two of them are equal, and it's 8 values for remaining lives times just the order chosen for the initial 3 levels.
Oh, I thought people might be interested to know that there are actually 3 endings to this game. Yes, seriously. This playthrough is the "Land path". There is also, the "water path" and "sky path". They each give different little fun facts. The path you get depends on which stage you pick first
Okay, I found what was cut compared to Triad Stone: Mainly it's a few shots at the end of a few levels where Ash surveys the area before the regular victory animation, but at the end of the snake level, he gets swarmed by some little snakes, then attacked by the headless snake's body until he makes it explode. Then after the stone at the end of the level with the big green guy, Ash catches a ride on a giant dish out of a crumbling cave with an entrance shaped like a skull, which then... erodes?
Thanks for that. I like how three stones in one game turned into seven stones in another. You can just keep reinserting the stone-collecting scene to have as many macguffins as you want! I also like that Triad Stone began to give more of the enemies names and constant mad laughter. The squeaky laughter goes well with the bathroom dance.
So.. they just decided to animate a bunch of sequences. Then decided to say, "That's enough." when it came time to actually craft the story that connected them together. Not only that, the programmers obviously probably finished the programming of the game before the animation part was finished or did it without actually seeing the animation because the movements and timing of the movements they set don't match the animation at all in three quarters of the instances where the player has to act. It's nice when a company's penny pinching is so blatantly obvious.
I think they wanted to make an anime first, but ran out of budget or got it cut and they stitched it into this mess. I mean, hell. They got the animator that directed shows like Dunbine or Xabungle, VAs like Horikawa and Shiozawa and THAT'S what they wanted to make?
MegamanElric16 Oh, huh, let me try to figure out what I was referring to back then... If it was the prototype disc, then the UA-cam video ID is rgPGA30YkPQ, and the deaths come after the levels, at 4:11, 6:45, 9:09, 11:12, 14:38, 17:22, and 20:34.
I checked out a longplay of Triad Stone, and while the in-game audio may be funnier, it didn't seem much longer; I think each game has just a few bits of animation the other lacks. Triad Stone names the hero Ash and has more of a "Steal back the Triforce from Gannon" kind of story, though it's not much easier to follow. Its opening scene is live footage of a camera pulling in on the resting place of the magic stone, and the setting is an island with the good sense to make blondie the final boss.
Yeah, and the Saturn version's stage select was just a row of pictures, not the crystals whirling around God, so we wouldn't have gotten to laugh at the emulator choking on that audio if Retsupurae had gotten a longplay of that one instead. I'm guessing the arcade version was never really finished and the console ports had to make up whatever they felt would fit things together the best, hence the scenes that seem to begin or end mid-action.
Triad Stone's soundtrack is different ? That's odd. I've heard of gameplay tweaks such as pressing for example left attack sometimes but this... Why would they do that ? Is it any better somehow ?
Zeta Gundam has a different character designer from L. Gaim and Dunbine, and I can find credit for neither of them. I definitely see the Dunbine comparison, but I wonder if it was actually Kogawa or someone who may have worked with him.
You're not kidding! I just found a playthrough of the sky path on the "monstrusoft" account. I like how they kinda ran out of ideas for a while and went, "Uh... Bigger balloons? More windmills?"
Unfortunately, no dice for the German Easter Bunny's translation, but it seems that due to a misunderstanding the Swedish word/s for Easter Bunny, that now the Swedish have a tradition about the "Påskkarlen", which can mean "The Easter Wizard". So in Sweden, kids dress up as witches on Easter in honor of the Easter Wizard delivering eggs to kids.
did they take a japanese game and then through in some expository dialogue and badly drawn scenes at the beginning in a horrid attempt to make it make sense?
One more thing, I actually like seeing Mike Dawson wander around and fail at things, misinterpret situations, not trying anything strenuous because he's a total pansy, and talking to people that hate him, it's fun in a very sad way, but mostly because he totally deserves everything that happens to him. This is opposed to the characters in heavy rain where I'm mostly indifferent to them whenever they're not being completely stupid.
Is the city-thing there to give us an idea of how long this guy took to find the orb-crystal-thingies? You'd think somewhere after the first thousand years god would've hired someone else.
Hey, if no one's seen all 48 endings, who's to say there isn't one where Alex is Santa Claus? Maybe it's like The Santa Clause, where the dying old man was the previous Santa, and putting on the suit slowly transforms Alex into the new Santa: His hair's halfway to being the stocking cap, and the heart protector thingy becomes the toy bag he can pull anything he wants out of. But first he has to help his friend the Easter Bunny collect eggs and also to defeat his nemesis Jack Frost in battle.
Actually, yes. After the 3DO system failed in the marketplace, the company behind it transitioned into a third-party developer (a la Sega post Dreamcast).
There's not much more to Triad Stone, but the exposition text it gives you between levels tries a little harder to explain some of the things you actually encounter during play. I hear it also has a more complex button prompt system that matches the action better... Basically the only area where Strahl was superior was the soundtrack, plus a branching storyline that could have been intriguing if it were part of some other game that had anything to do with it.
I gotta say the best animated part was the mummy snake fight. If it didnt look like i was staring at a shitty tv with the colors it would've been pretty neat to watch.
Yeah, so maybe this additional story wasn't too original... But the animation was completed in 1985, and I can only wonder what the intended meaning of it was.
To be fair, there's no explicit connection between the two things. Maybe he's just doing all that stuff to keep our world safe, so it can flourish, like in that game Eternal Darkness.
"And on the seventh day, the Lord's mic broke. And then the Lord rested until the store sent him a new one, since he had a 10 day warranty."
-Old Testiment, Technical 4-04
You know how in most QTE games, the prompts are somewhat relevant to the action that the character is supposed to take? Like pressing left to dodge to the left or something? Apparently the team behind Strahl didn't know that.
To be fair, apparently there are no good 3DO emulators out there, and somehow the button prompts became wildly out of sync with the video. It's not really the developers' fault.
Mark Marchesini Is that also the reason the audio compression is so bad?
dennismoore56
I suppose so.
To be fair, the crap that's going on in the video isn't actually the 3DO's fault. It's just that there is literally no good 3DO emulator out there. Seriously. Neither of the two I tried can even run _Super Street Fighter II Turbo_ decently, so what hope could there be for a game that uses sprite resizing between FMV clips? The incredibly desynced input notifications may also be because of that, but I don't know for sure.
It might have been smarter to longplay the Saturn version, or even better, the Pioneer LaserActive version (via capture card?) called _Triad Stone_.
Yes, I'm pretty sure the input desynchs are due to the emulator too, all coming more slowly than they should and falling way behind the FMV, just as the intro story animations finish faster than they should and cut off the narrator. You can find a few longplays done on console where the inputs make sense and don't go all to the way to when Alex has passed all the danger. (The emulator I tried also makes the input notifications flicker, but this might not be possible to see on UA-cam due to its lower maximum framerate.)
Triad Stone does have the more logical story from what I've seen. The downside is you don't get all those crazy endings Strahl has, but that aspect can't be conveyed in a single longplay anyway, unless you want to dedicate two-thirds of the video to an ending collection. And just how many people ever invested in a Mega-LD setup? It's just a shame the Saturn version doesn't seem to be available in English and leaves out some between-level animations.
I don't know how come nobody said it yet, so
The Lord malfunctions in mysterious ways.
I love you.
This game answers the eternal question:
Can God make a CD-ROM so scratched even He cannot Disc Doctor it?
+rustybender Heh, the ISO I found of this seems to have audio skips or pops in the worst sea-based ending.
Raiden, I think we accidentally loaded ze wrong VR mission.
"Damn you, religious microphone!" might be the most wonderful sentence in human history.
An... Army of Me? OF COURSE! It's a video game inspired by Bjork, it all makes sense now!
Did anything make sense in the 80s?
13:55 yknow that fight could have been really pretty actually had it been better animated. and if it wasn't in this.
***** And if anything in it made sense.
What if this game is about Alex metaphorically finding god and battling his depression and low self esteem? I just have the feeling that this is what it's about.
The stage you picked first chose your "path", air, land, or water. Which would affect the fun facts, then the order you played the other stages in made VERY minor changes to the ending cutscene.
If anyone ever wondered how Legend of Zelda and Sonic The Hedgehog would be if written by the Pope after drinking too much wine.
LOL
The yellow guys speak entirely in Wario noises
Super Pompadour Ascot Warrior II.
I'm picturing this game's creation being a series of brainstorming sessions and they used every single idea in the finished product.
My mind was reciting a mantra of "He's getting the crystals, he's getting the crystals" as I tried to fill in a reason for everything happening. Just trying to rationalize all the constant and different events. I think my mind was hiding my confusion, even now, as I rewatch this one again.
Anime Elvis Link ain't afraid of NO man.
"The invention of the motor vehicle has made the poeple's lives pleasant"
I think a video of the guy recording the "Link" sounds would be more interesting.
I really like this anime story of Santa Claus and his quest to collect the mystical Easter eggs for his good friend, the Easter Bunny. I'd name this game "Weihnachtsmann: Intergalactic Warrior of the Pompadour." (it's especially awesome that apparently that German name for Santa translates to "Holy-Night-Man".)
0:59 Most Epic Care Bear Stare EVAR!
Considering the gameplay of these types of games is so easy to make, you would think they could at least make the input commands fit the action the protagonist is doing.....you know, it isn't that hard.
I like the monster designs in these old fmv qte games.
Wow the more i watch The funnier these guys get
Do the button prompts have _anything_ to do with what's happening on-screen?
Having watched this a few times, I think the problem is the QTE inputs and the actual on-screen actions are *way* out of sync, so you end up reacting to QTE's that should have appeared earlier.
Trisask09
i think it's the other way around. a few of the prompts come on screen long before the event ever happens, so it looks odd.
Thomas Jenkins In the Whiteasnake one, they're delayed, actually, and they slowly fall behind the action.
***** if you are saying they come after the event, then how does the game know what cut scene to show? that doesn't make any sense.
Thomas Jenkins That's...a good point; Still, it's weird how the first thing the guy does, dodging, has its command slightly afterwards, and nothing happens before that, then the second event shows a long meter and he takes a while to do it.
pompadour warrior? so Space Dandy?
Kazuma Kuwabara could apply, as well.
I especially like how half the time the prompts don't match up to what happens on screen
I'm glad we could help the poeple :)
Why is it the crystals were different colors in the beginning, but then every time Strahl got one, they were the same cyan-ish color? Also, what happens if you miss the command to pick up the crystal? Does Strahl trip and die?
+HW W He realises the plot is stupid, and goes home.
+HW W This game replaces the original level endings with stock footage from the first level to pretend there are more stones, and that command was actually from an earlier event due to an emulation error.
If you re-watch the entire thing from the beginning and imagine it actually IS the Santa Claus origin story, this game actually seems pretty awesome
After we did this video, I learned the Mega CD version is longer, so maybe it makes more sense? Some graphics (Strahl/Eric looking over the desert) look new to the game too... maybe it was adapted from an anime?
LOL one of the VA credits is vegeta.
13:28 "Poeple"?
I'm surprised no one noticed that typo...
"Are you alright....Lord?" made me laugh so hard I actually hurt myself.
What sort of taffy is that hair made of?
17:09 Anybody else notice the Photoshop transparency texture right next to Evil Strahl's right foot for a split second?
Quality animation, everyone.
Did they even have photoshop when this was released?
***** thanks for reminding me of that, now watching at 2.0 speed.
***** The original game, _Triad Stone_ (which the LaserDisc footage was taken from), was released in 1985, though.
Kuuenbu I just learned the unfinished game Triad Stone was made from was called Chantze's Stone.
I don't think it would depend entirely on the order, though: You get a choice of 3 at the start, then you do the other 5 in any order and leave only the crystal-cave mirror-clone level for last, so I believe that would be three times five factorial or 360 permutations. The manual mentions you get 2 continues and 3 lives per continue, making 9 possibilities for lives lost; maybe two of them are equal, and it's 8 values for remaining lives times just the order chosen for the initial 3 levels.
Oh, I thought people might be interested to know that there are actually 3 endings to this game. Yes, seriously. This playthrough is the "Land path". There is also, the "water path" and "sky path". They each give different little fun facts. The path you get depends on which stage you pick first
16:50
So, just how long was he going to lie unconscious face-down in the water there?
Okay, I found what was cut compared to Triad Stone: Mainly it's a few shots at the end of a few levels where Ash surveys the area before the regular victory animation, but at the end of the snake level, he gets swarmed by some little snakes, then attacked by the headless snake's body until he makes it explode. Then after the stone at the end of the level with the big green guy, Ash catches a ride on a giant dish out of a crumbling cave with an entrance shaped like a skull, which then... erodes?
Thanks for that. I like how three stones in one game turned into seven stones in another. You can just keep reinserting the stone-collecting scene to have as many macguffins as you want!
I also like that Triad Stone began to give more of the enemies names and constant mad laughter. The squeaky laughter goes well with the bathroom dance.
Hmm... drugs.
That's all I'm getting out of this.
Possibly mushrooms?
Terumi Yūki Anime ruins everything.
Valdetiosi Even drugs? :(
Terumi Yūki
Even drugs.
Valdetiosi Aww.. sadness.
So.. they just decided to animate a bunch of sequences. Then decided to say, "That's enough." when it came time to actually craft the story that connected them together. Not only that, the programmers obviously probably finished the programming of the game before the animation part was finished or did it without actually seeing the animation because the movements and timing of the movements they set don't match the animation at all in three quarters of the instances where the player has to act. It's nice when a company's penny pinching is so blatantly obvious.
I think they wanted to make an anime first, but ran out of budget or got it cut and they stitched it into this mess.
I mean, hell. They got the animator that directed shows like Dunbine or Xabungle, VAs like Horikawa and Shiozawa and THAT'S what they wanted to make?
Waste of talent, yeah.
And would you believe that the Saturn version's "canvas" intro story is drawn in a different style than in this one?
On a scale of 1 to apple, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
JOINT EFFORTS: these were the guys who were rolling them for the artists and programmers
22:33 Huh. I was expecting Motoi Sakuraba's name to show up there. The music here kinda reminds me of Valkyrie Profile or Star Ocean at times...
48 of them to be exact. It depends on the order in which you enter the levels.
That would explain why the "paradise" at the end was just some field, instead of the highly futuristic city that was apparently being built.
Yeah it was. Actraiser was released on 1990 (JAP) and 1991 (US), and Strahl was on 1993-1994 (JAP) and 1995 (US)..
Depends on if they added more scenes or more transitions.
A death reel of this game should prove highly amusing..
+Maria Isabella I've seen one! They reuse a lot of the same sequences, though.
+BagOfMagicFood Could you share the link to it if you reply? That would be cool.
MegamanElric16 Oh, huh, let me try to figure out what I was referring to back then...
If it was the prototype disc, then the UA-cam video ID is rgPGA30YkPQ, and the deaths come after the levels, at 4:11, 6:45, 9:09, 11:12, 14:38, 17:22, and 20:34.
I checked out a longplay of Triad Stone, and while the in-game audio may be funnier, it didn't seem much longer; I think each game has just a few bits of animation the other lacks. Triad Stone names the hero Ash and has more of a "Steal back the Triforce from Gannon" kind of story, though it's not much easier to follow. Its opening scene is live footage of a camera pulling in on the resting place of the magic stone, and the setting is an island with the good sense to make blondie the final boss.
Surprised they didn't mention the typo "poeple" at 13:25.
This creppy pasta writter really put a lot of effort, doing this animation and all that
I like to see people like you actually try to ignore things you don't like for once.
Yeah, and the Saturn version's stage select was just a row of pictures, not the crystals whirling around God, so we wouldn't have gotten to laugh at the emulator choking on that audio if Retsupurae had gotten a longplay of that one instead.
I'm guessing the arcade version was never really finished and the console ports had to make up whatever they felt would fit things together the best, hence the scenes that seem to begin or end mid-action.
Amuro vs char is really silly with regular swords instead of rapiers
Looks more like Judeu to me
hedgehog3180 we do not speak of double zeta
I'd give you camille but not judah
Never judah
It surprises me that, given how powerful the 3DO was touted to be, that there are so many slowdown issues - in an FMV game, no less.
Triad Stone's soundtrack is different ? That's odd.
I've heard of gameplay tweaks such as pressing for example left attack sometimes but this...
Why would they do that ? Is it any better somehow ?
the people in the join efforts were just the people who supplied the pot to come up with ideas for this game.
I might be crazy, but doesn't the end credit music sound a little like "Rowsdower Saves Us" from MST3K?
Zeta Gundam has a different character designer from L. Gaim and Dunbine, and I can find credit for neither of them. I definitely see the Dunbine comparison, but I wonder if it was actually Kogawa or someone who may have worked with him.
6:35 That's an Imp from Doom. Add spikes and it'd look just like one.
or some horribly designed mancubus + some melee hexen cannon fodder enemy from the monster resource wad
Alsom, isv this where Sonic got his "TERIAAAAAAAAAA~!" inspiration from?
I'm so glad we managed give all those Poeple motor vehicles.
Lantern ghosts have transportation needs, too.
You're not kidding! I just found a playthrough of the sky path on the "monstrusoft" account. I like how they kinda ran out of ideas for a while and went, "Uh... Bigger balloons? More windmills?"
Would there be any way to mix the Strahl soundtrack into Triad Stone?
Unfortunately, no dice for the German Easter Bunny's translation, but it seems that due to a misunderstanding the Swedish word/s for Easter Bunny, that now the Swedish have a tradition about the "Påskkarlen", which can mean "The Easter Wizard". So in Sweden, kids dress up as witches on Easter in honor of the Easter Wizard delivering eggs to kids.
The point of this adventure was less about the crystals and more about the hero just wanting to try out freerunning.
hey when are you guys going to retsupurae Heavy Rain?
did they take a japanese game and then through in some expository dialogue and badly drawn scenes at the beginning in a horrid attempt to make it make sense?
its like terranigma except you just press buttons while watching a bunch of unconnected anime scenes
There's no way the voice section was that long. It was just the narrator, God and a couple of grunts!
?!
There was a branching choice system involved?
One more thing, I actually like seeing Mike Dawson wander around and fail at things, misinterpret situations, not trying anything strenuous because he's a total pansy, and talking to people that hate him, it's fun in a very sad way, but mostly because he totally deserves everything that happens to him.
This is opposed to the characters in heavy rain where I'm mostly indifferent to them whenever they're not being completely stupid.
This game makes Badlands seem like a well thought out comprehensible story.
Is the city-thing there to give us an idea of how long this guy took to find the orb-crystal-thingies?
You'd think somewhere after the first thousand years god would've hired someone else.
Hey, if no one's seen all 48 endings, who's to say there isn't one where Alex is Santa Claus? Maybe it's like The Santa Clause, where the dying old man was the previous Santa, and putting on the suit slowly transforms Alex into the new Santa: His hair's halfway to being the stocking cap, and the heart protector thingy becomes the toy bag he can pull anything he wants out of. But first he has to help his friend the Easter Bunny collect eggs and also to defeat his nemesis Jack Frost in battle.
I think the idea here was to make the game more challenging by not having the button prompts correspond to anything on screen.
I really can't believe that Don and Cindy's Wacky Adventure had a more followable plot than this.
Actually, yes. After the 3DO system failed in the marketplace, the company behind it transitioned into a third-party developer (a la Sega post Dreamcast).
My brain auto-corrected that to "balloon-popping"...and then I had a disturbing thought that the auto-correction might be incorrect. Eep.
I'm legitimately curious: did someone have a grand vision that got cut down for the CD, or did they just make crap up?
Isn't Kenji Satoh the guy who did Ghost in the Shell? Man, he worked on a lot of crap before that.
This seems like dungeons lair except this looks like its a regular animie just with keypresses that doesnt do a thing
There's not much more to Triad Stone, but the exposition text it gives you between levels tries a little harder to explain some of the things you actually encounter during play.
I hear it also has a more complex button prompt system that matches the action better... Basically the only area where Strahl was superior was the soundtrack, plus a branching storyline that could have been intriguing if it were part of some other game that had anything to do with it.
The sound issues stem from emulation, doesn't happen on an actual 3DO
4:08 "This is a really bad day."
Now I wonder what a Tomb Raider game would be like if it were done in this style.
Joint Efforts should have had a listing for Slowbeef and Diabetus.
@ArmoredChocobo That is strangely perfectly fitting.
I'd like to think this is where 80's anime that was canceled during production goes to die.
I'm still shocked that in the pile of 'Dragon Lair'-esque games, that Time Gal still has a relatively coherent story by comparison.
I gotta say the best animated part was the mummy snake fight.
If it didnt look like i was staring at a shitty tv with the colors it would've been pretty neat to watch.
Yeah, so maybe this additional story wasn't too original... But the animation was completed in 1985, and I can only wonder what the intended meaning of it was.
"This is somehow worse than Time Gal" I let out the most audible "What?!" I have ever done.
I'm beginning to notice that FMV game protagonists seem to go through more hell in 30 seconds than most other game protagonists do in 10 minutes.
Geeze, is THIS what the scouts go through when exploring the map?
To be fair, there's no explicit connection between the two things. Maybe he's just doing all that stuff to keep our world safe, so it can flourish, like in that game Eternal Darkness.