thread where I play Advent Rising (2005) and tell you how much it kicks ass

This game predated the 360 by a few months, but it is spiritually the first Xbox 360 Game

By which I mean, INCREDIBLY over-ambitious, weird third-person brawler, which blew its entire budget polishing awesome but totally unnecessary features, and then got rushed out the door in a barely-functioning state, and destroyed both its studio and the publisher that funded it

In other words, the best type of videogame

Majesco Entertainment was ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED this game was the Halo Killer

They spent, like, Dew Pope levels of marketing budget. They bought TV ads, movie theater ads, there was a tie-in comic book series, they hired Ender's Game author and weirdass mormon Orson Scott Card

They had a promotion where the first run of copies had hidden collectibles scattered around the corners of the levels, and the first person to find all of them would win ONE MILLION DOLLARS

(this promotion was immediately canceled, partly because there was basically no conceivable way this could work, and also because Majesco Entertainment almost certainly did not posses One Million Dollars)

Anyway the game came out and was universally panned

Reviews said it was an obvious Halo ripoff (true), that it was basically unplayable due to constant softlock bugs (true), that the character designs had weird giant legs (FUCK YOU LEARN TO APPRECIATE ART THEY LOOK COOL AS HELL)

Anyway a few months later they released the PC version, which was what I played. PC release fixed pretty much all the progression-blocking bugs. Apart from being kind of crashy it was technically Fine

by this point the studio and publisher were both basically doomed though

see, this is the thing! it was 2005! everyone had just found out about Blame and was reading CLAMP manga at Borders!

characters with two-meter-long legs in flare pants were *cool*

genuinely do not know why people thought it looked bad, except that Gamers Have No Taste

anyway: the actual videogame

when this man is kicked in the balls it makes the halo 1 melee noise

lmao I love this 45-degree ramp in the middle of a carpeted hallway

the spirit of Quake 3 mapmaking was still very much lingering in 2005

They spent a LOT of money on random NPC conversations in this starting level. Most of the space station is inhabited by Steve Blum

lmao I forgot how the actual plot gets started:

Aliens show up, and go "OMG you're humans! You're like gods! Also uhhh some evil aliens followed us here and they're going to destroy your planet. We're very sorry about this"

"OOF"

I like to think nobody had the guts to tell Orson Scott Card "You can't write a scene where you carry a guy with a broken leg; we'd have to build a whole character controller for 10 minutes of gameplay" so they just built a whole character controller for 10 minutes of gameplay

Speaking "unnecessary and expensive but very cool polish", the enemies' pathfinding lets them jump off of walls

I'm assuming this was not at all easy to implement in Unreal 2

(excuse my nauseating camera movements but the game treats the mouse like a joystick and applies wildly different sensitivity AND acceleration curves to the X and Y axes separately. Also controller support is broken lmao)

(thankfully the whole game is built around auto-aim. Like zelda-style Z-targeting with guns. So mercifully you never have to actually aim precisely with the extremely janky mouse controls lol)

game is absolutely full of these elaborate scripted themepark sequences

they really thought they were making bioshock infinite on a 2005 budget

I remember some promo interview where the devs were like "It's like you're PLAYING inside a MOVIE that HAPPENING AROUND YOU"

oh wow I had actually never made the Humans Worshipped As Alien Gods -> Mormonism connection before right now and: FUCK

man this isn't even the first time; I read Card's Memory of Earth books around when this game came out and didn't find out until AFTERWARDS that the whole series is just an elaborate sci-fi allegory for The Book of Mormon

the core premise of those books is that Women Having Rights is a luxury that can only be afforded by an advanced society, and such a society is fundamentally Decadent and soon ruined, and then the Laws of Nature will be restored and men will Fight and women will Conceive

I was like full-on homeschool christian conservative apologetics teen at the time and even THEN I was like "wow uh this is kind of incredibly misogynistic huh"

even the wikipedia summary is eventually like "oh yeah this book really hates women" lmao

man that really is just literally a Covenant ship huh

Anyway since this game is Definitely Not Halo, you start out on Definitely Not The Pillar of Autumn, which gets attacked by aliens and destroyed, and the player crash-lands in an escape pod to a nearby planet, and then you spend the next level driving Definitely Not A Warthog

the notwarthog handling is absolute chaos

they replicated the warthog "orient towards cursor" controls, but the tires have nearly infinite friction and there is no suspension. like at all

so it just kind of ONLY moves in the exact direction it's pointing lmao

also it has boost

it's like you're playing a movie

love too program enemy encounters

I should probably note that the first couple levels of this game are by far the weakest part. If you played it on your own there's a good chance you quit fairly early, because it gets REALLY frustrating to play lol

The early bits are a p generic run-and-gun kind of thing, with WAY too many enemies and terrible warthog physics and it just kind of drags on and on for what feels like forever

I can def imagine a lot of people who played this in 2005 basically went "game sucks" and stopped lol

I need to go to bed so I won't get past this part tonight, but once you're through the first major chapter you obtain Superpowers and then the game suddenly gets WILDLY different, and starts kind of going off the rails [complimentary]

hes fine he has a lot of hp

also I love that taking out the glass walkway somehow destroyed an entire skyscraper lmao

critical hit on its weak point I guess

i love this game

Commands for Gamers

SO: After the first few hours of being a very Expensive but otherwise unremarkable third-person halo clone, Space Earth gets blown up by aliens and then you find out that humans are alien gods and you have force powers

henceforth the game Rules

First power you get is telekinesis

You are then immediately dropped on the exterior of an alien ship, without guns, and start just hurling dudes into fucking space (or the nearest Destructible Physics Object)

the controls are designed around dual wielding (because what could be more 2000s badass than Dual Wielding)

you can assign a gun or a force power to each hand

one of this game's Signature Moves is using gun+kinesis to like pin a dude in the air and then shoot him a bunch lol

lmaoooo I THOUGHT the aspect ratio looked Weird

Turns out the steam version ships with a third-party mod already installed?? which claims to fix widescreen support but instead just fucks everything up????

I am the only person on the planet who knows what an aspect ratio is, which makes googling for these problems impossible because the only thing Gamers ever care about is the presence or absence of Black Bars lmao

the patch removed The Black Bars, thus squashing everything weird

The original game ran in 4:3 but intentionally letterboxed itself to 16:9, in order to appear Cinematic

Unfortunately now that we HAVE 16:9 displays, this breaks everything

I have corrected the problem, by undoing the mod's adjustments and setting my television to 1600x1200

I can now play Advent Rising on a 16:9 display, in 4:3, letterboxed to 16:9, as Orson Scott Card intended

Note how you can now actually SEE the protagonists' cool-ass legs

Previously they were both vertically stretched AND cut off by the bottom of the screen, because the game uses horizontal FOV so widening the aspect ratio narrows the vertical field lol

alright now that OBS is capturing at the *thrilling* resolution of 1440x810

you almost immediately get a second ability: a hilariously overpowered force push

it launches everything backwards, detonates grenades, and reflects projectiles

(also when you level up you explode)

the game instantly stops being anything like a halo clone and turns into this absolutely wild fast-paced physics-y brawler

your primary verbs are
- Throw Shit at Dudes
- Throw Dudes at Shit

look at how cool these dodge animations are

when you dodge a lot your dodges level up and the animations get progressively cooler

also it does the like P* thing where the follow-through animations are cancelable, but if you don't make any other inputs he just holds a cool pose

wow nice room full of giant lasers, perfectly arranged for a guy with telekinesis to fight a bunch of aliens in

something about the timing of the audio and camera work here just feels like pure gmod youtube poop lmao

I like this alien design a lot

One of the many aspects of this game that were clearly given a ton of polish super early before they were entirely sure how important it would be

It's a really elaborate design with a ton of flashy animation, but it's only used for one EXTREMELY jank boss fight that clearly had zero time for playtesting/iteration

The game is filled with stuff like this; there's a very clear sense that the devs spent a TON of time sort of aimlessly building Cool Stuff and polishing the hell out of it, and then suddenly went into "Oh shit, we are out of money and time, this needs to ship NOW" panic mode

Hi, I'm John 117, and welcome to The Silent Cartographer

SEISMIC POUND

SEISMIC POUND

SEISMIC POUND

lmaooo I had completely forgotten about this cutscene. there is SO MUCH going on here

The desperate desire to impress the player with mediocre writing

The two different pieces of music awkwardly cross-fading over each other

The overt Mormonism

The hero obtaining the sacred artifact and placing it into the pocket of his circa-2005 cargo pants

*setting the TV to Primary Display*
*changing the TV to 1600x1200*
*activating the 1440x810 OBS profile*
*activating the OBS scene that centers the 1080 elgato capture in the 1440x810 canvas*

It is Time for Advent Rising Posts

One very funny aspect of this game: The weird awkward cross-faded music in that earlier video is actually present pretty much everywhere

they got tommy tallarico to do this extremely expensive orchestral score, but none of it loops or cleanly transitions between tracks

presumably they *intended* to solve this; by 2005 games with non-synthesized dynamic scores weren't super uncommon

but as always, much of this game's charm comes from it constantly doing something ridiculously expensive and then having to give up without quite finishing it lol

So like, a major thing that makes this game actually Good rather than merely Interesting is that the devs built the whole combat system and then shipped the game before balancing ANY of it, or making more than like three enemies

You're absurdly OP after getting one superpower, and then it just KEEPS GIVING YOU MORE SUPERPOWERS

You get at least one new power every level, and every power has at least 2 modes, and some have more

The enemies never get any stronger though lmao

So very quickly, combat basically becomes walking into a room and going "hmm, which ridiculous tools would I like to use to destroy everything here"

the force-push move just.... doesn't have a cooldown

it just goes off as fast as you can click the mouse button and the damage stacks lmao

How about a move that makes you invulnerable to damage and knocks back anything that touches you

and it lasts like 30 seconds

just get the base functionality committed and then we'll balance it once everything's worki-*MAJESCO'D*

it turns out that balanced combat is for Cowards, and making the player wildly overpowered in a single-player game is actually super fun as long as there's enough shit bouncing off of the player to make attacks feel awesome (see also: Hammerfight, Kingdom Hearts 2)

"OOF"

He'll Yeah Video Games

Honestly I'm kind of surprised this game never really picked up speedrunners. World record is 10 years old lol

For some reason virtually EVERY piece of scenery geo has collisions enabled, and with all the Physics Jank you can kind of climb all over the levels

lmaoo I completely forgot about this

the heroes are Betrayed, the protagonist is knocked unconscious and his friends are imprisoned

...and then there's a loading screen and you're just.... on a space skyscraper? fighting some dudes?

presumably there was supposed to be a whole cutscene there and they didn't manage to make it in time lol

resurrecting the Advent Rising thread because I found out there was a prominent Mormon theologian (?) named James Talmage and I was like "wait where have I heard that name before" and then I remembered it's tHE FUCKING ROCKET LAUNCHER FROM ADVENT RISING

NO

how is mormon halo a real game

Might as well finish The Advent Rising Thread while I've got the game open

It's a giant pain to get running but there's a bunch of other cool stuff I wanted to show

check out how cool these jump animations are

all the basic player movement stuff is ridiculously stylish; the goofy character proportions work really well for making rad silhouettes

(also it's supposed to have shadows but modern drivers broke them somehow)

one of my favorite "oh shit, we are out of time/money, ship this TOMORROW" bits is these cutscenes that needed to depict battles between huge armies

they're very clearly just running the game while a dev tries to do documentary-style camera work using mouselook and WASD lmao

if I had to guess, the process was probably

- Animating a dozen aliens fighting is too much work, just use the AI we already wrote

- AI isn't deterministic so we can't make camera splines that follow the action

- Easiest solution is just use noclip and try to "film" it by hand

there are lots of ways you COULD solve those problems but all of them require time/budget that clearly wasn't available

a few cutscenes shipped with the HUD still visible lol

(those actually got sort-of patched out on the steam version, eventually)

This game also features one of my all-time favorite bits of wildly-unnecessary polish:

The main character's head dynamically turns to ensure that he is ALWAYS Looking Dramatically Offscreen

tbh the last few hours of the game are a mess; the need to actually finish the game and get it out the door clearly started to bite pretty hard

they still give you a lot of rooms where you walk in and mesh leftclick and everything explodes though

I do sometimes miss the era where "Destructible Environments" was considered the highest aim of the medium

They try to do the warthog run from the end of halo but you're in a hovertank with awful controls and you just kind of float down a big red tube shooting enemies with way, way too much health for what feels like half an hour lol

whole thing ends very abruptly with some Mind-Blowing Revelations that don't make enough sense to be interesting, and then the whole thing ends on a cliffhanger

spoiler: Mormon Halo did not, in fact, continue

They were gonna make a trilogy out of this, they were working on a PSP spinoff game, and then it came out and tanked so hard that it took out the dev studio AND the publisher

Majesco had sunk so much money into this and Psychonauts that it pretty much just ended them

the studio was named GlyphX, and this was the only thing they ever released lol

a chunk of the team reformed as Chair Entertainment, who made Shadow Complex (XBLA metroidvania before "indie metroidvania" became a totally saturated market), then got bought by Epic

Just trawling through mobygames here but it looks like most of them are credited on Fortnite so I guess they stuck around

a few others went to Avalanche (the disney one, not the Just Cause one) instead of Chair, so uhhhhh RIP I guess

also I feel bad for laughing at this one dude's career arc but fuckin OOF lol

The GBA Bionicle game -> Advent Rising -> lose your job immediately after crunching to hell -> fuck this industry, never again lmao

at least it was the 2001 bionicle game that actually shipped

MEANWHILE Renowned Science Fiction Author And Weirdass Mormon Orson Scott Card stayed in touch with the Chair guys and ended up writing Empire, a novel set in the Shadow Complex universe

it was by all accounts unremarkable but MY DUDE THAT IS THE FUCKING HALO TANK WHAT ARE YOU D

IN CONCLUSION:

Advent Rising (2005) kicks ass