i always have false gex quotes going through my head like ‘the echo in this cave reminds me of my moms pussy’ or 'its caliper time!" or ‘real bud dwyer moment over here’
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I believe that now is the right time for a Gex reboot because they could probably actually just get real Dennis Miller this time and it would end up completely incoherent
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Also following up this one is good. That man died as he lived (drinking constantly.)
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100% positive it’s just a “famous asian celeb at the time of writing this reference” joke bc she had a sitcom at the time. Like if you swap out Margaret Cho for Jackie Chan, it works exactly the same.
Actually, now that I’m imagining it, it’d be funnier if every celeb reference in the game was just swapped with Jackie Chan. Gex only knows one celebrity edition
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like a lightning bolt this came to me. This One IS a pubic hair reference. Before she came out she had a bit in her act about how unkept she was.
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for my entire life I have been totally baffled as to why massive out of control bush is in any way not preferable… if no one else got me I know Tinto Brass got me
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that time Shelley Winters poured water on him on The Tonight Show has been part of my mental montage listening to The Beach Boys’ ‘Johnny Carson’
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Appartments in video games!
Or houses. My main thing is the use of them as a secondary character and world building tool in more open world games, I’m less interested in their use in walking or linear immersive sims (although we’ll see there’s a connection). Collection of random thoughts, it’s gonna be a bit NSFW on a couple occasions, partly due to the french.
When I think about that I often first think of the Nomad Soul, of course. In that game where you can possess a number of characters who immediately become silent protagonists, exploring their appartments can give you great insight into their lives. You initial character’s appartment has a a lot of stuff including a TV with several programs, newspapers and books, a pet and, uh, famously, a loving wife that you can sleep with.
But also this is not quite true as only the first two or three apartments you explore have that level of detail and as a lot of late Nomad Soul is hastily thrown together most of the later ones are some of the laziest copy-pasted garbage ever. I guess detailed protagonist apartments as character building are a mainstay of future QD games but they’re not open so they interest me a lot less.
Slight tangent but another interesting yet underexploited thing in Nomad Soul is the playable characters’ pockets. The stuff they have when you possess them is at least meant to be indicative of their character and interests.
Anyway, this actually also occurs quite a bit earlier, it was a thing in Ultima, from 6 onward I’d say? Very prominent in 7, 7.5 and 8. I guess detailed character schedules play into this, too. They also do some world building through character inventory, but you have to kill them to go through their things (aside from party members). Immersive sims got a lot of hybridization from Ultima of course, for obvious historical reasons.
It strikes me that the closest successor to Ultima 7 in many worldbuilding and systemic respects is BotW/TotK, which does the invididualized houses and full schedules thing really well. Also they do another extremely Ultima thing that’ll be in another post. Anyway!
Back around 96-97, during the cd-rom boom, I remember the french were very into the potential of this, like they weren’t games, they were cyber worlds and second realities. They had that proto Second Life called Le deuxième Monde with a whole 3d Paris where you were gonna live a virtual online life and also brands would do the metaverse thing before it was called a metaverse. Never really worked out but it’s part of a whole bunch of artsy stuff they’d show on TV to make you dream, notably a show called cyber culture.
On one of those shows, must’ve been while they were discussing cyber worlds and whatever, they were showing a clip from an early CD-rom game that had an explorable building and an explorable apartment with a working TV. You could take video discs from nearby shelves and put them in the player and different programs would play on the screen. Kinda the whole Omikron feature set, definitely feels like it’d have been an influence, but I’d place it as real early Macromedia director stuff, mostly hand-drawn but some CG for the TV videos. Fascinating stuff.
For three decades I would not know what that game or program was.
And somehow I remember the cursor picking up something that looked a lot like… a dildo? Well, that still tracks with Nomad Soul.
It’s very recently that I learned the game shown, on a somewhat serious if arty french show in the late afternoon, was the first Virtual Valerie of all things, a rather famous 1990 porn game on mac. So really, might well have inspired the whole Nomad Soul apartment feature set.
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men hate it when women look like adults
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youth is revolting
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Marathon 2’s sprawling levels are such a contrast to the linear hallway design of contemporary FPSes. Things are so expensive to make now you can’t afford to make a map that big with that many “dead ends” and “pointless” areas. Turns out you can have a box room with textures and some ambient sounds and it feels just as good as an overly decorated room. Although I’m wondering if these maps were meant to do double duty as multiplayer maps. It’s wild how level design has basically regressed because the fidelity and detail demands of gamers make anything else cost prohibitive.
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gex walks into a saloon level “hope I don’t slip on ric flairs shit!”
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it’s so hilarious what this fantastic post is buried between ahahha
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i was mixing two posts up
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I mean, does it matter
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Like the original game, the game has maps specifically designed/exclusive to multiplayer so I don’t think that’s the case
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What one-liners would Gex say in a hypothetical Gex 4?
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gex in 2025 would be saying like 2007 imageboard memes imo
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all your base are belong to gex!
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