This was the game that taught me that reloading still keeps the bullet in the chamber. 6 year old me didnt know what to do with that info but by god he had it now.
This year's Christmas included a 3-hour long Whitelight vid on Darksiders 2, an hour long Raycevick vid on Mass Effect: Andromeda, a 35 minute long Mandalore vid on Pathologic, and now an hour long vid from Tehsnakerer? Merry Christmas! And thank you!
Wide Dantas A few months ago I found a dead owl in the woods and I was worried it was Shammy... All praise our Lord and Savior Shammy's revival from the dead!
Not to mention Mauler about to drop a big body Civic worth of a video Christmas too? This has been my favorite holiday this year thanks to everyone of the RU-vidrs I follow.
The twist that the first cover-based shooter also knew that you can't solely base a video game on that mechanic, and instead turns out to be a speed game demanding you actually play fast enough to save the day is radical
Re-watching this, your second playthrough revelation seems very similar to mine with Vanquish. When I tried the demo, I approached it as a pure cover shooter. And if you play Vanquish as such, you'll end up having a rotten time - so I ignored the game at launch. It wasn't until about year later that I saw a gameplay dissection of it and realized 'holy heck, I got this game all wrong'. Upon returning to it, I loved it to bits (naturally)!
The problem with why the controls seem weird is because it was designed for the legendary n64 death claw with its Z trigger shenanigans (along with C-button functions..). Playstation controllers are missing that Z trigger button which means they had to move its functions elsewhere. Its been so long I honestly forget what its mapped too. But I still remember mapping it to a keyboard (IJKL for D-pad, Arrows for stick.. numpad for c buttons 'n everything else) and beating the game since default sensitivity for stick movements was perfect enough for a simple tap to aim up when you auto-aim at an enemy for an easy headshot. Game became a matter of finding cover and getting enemy to stop so you can cap him.
That ending I think proves it's an intentional MGS parody. It's parodying the end of the original Metal Gear so hard it's parodying the end of MGSV over a decade early.
I never thought I'd see this game again. (: Pure nostalgia and I 100% agree that it is a product of it's time. I had fun playing it back then. It's the good kind of janky. (:
I really hope you cover Predator: Concrete Jungle one day - I really like your content! I was super hyped for the game and then it came out and got bashed (2.75/10 from Game Informer iirc). I played it and recognized it as being awful but thought it was a lot of fun, if frustrating as hell at the same time. I think this was the first game I purposely went out of my way to 100%.
47:55 here is the thing, i think that cecile always had that second plan that shown up in the good ending. but it's a backup plan in case S.C.A.T. were able to get to the control room in time and if they didnt, well, he was probs only going with the crying lions cause it was gonna pay out big time if their plan was successful. regardless if america pulled those troops out sarcozia or not. he didn't get the money regardless of whether it was the good ending or not, but at least in the bad ending he played a major part in completely destroying america's government. dan being a solid no show in the bad ending is something i have nothing for. maybe he died from the heli blowing up in the bad ending? or was just able to secretly get to where cecile and kenneth were without anyone knowing to keep an eye on them in case cecile betrayed them or something. and in the bad ending, he slipped out of the facility and went completely AWOL and was never found again.
I always saw cover shooting mechanics in the same way i saw turn-based combat: its a solid framework that needs to be expanded on with other inovative ideas. I hate when people blame a whole mechanic based only on a game not doing enough to develop it
Oh man I had this game and it felt like the most revolutionary thing, for whatever reason it also came to me in a Metal Gear Solid case and my idiot child brain somehow decided that meant it was a new Metal Gear. I essentially thought this was Metal Gear Solid 2 and when I got the actual Metal Gear Solid 2 years later I initially assumed it to be some sort of remake. Disregarding all that I LOVED this games deathmatching but I couldn't finish the story cause it would freeze often whenever I tried to play the story. I'll never forget that first impression that those graphics and mechanics brought to me though, I was so blown away.
It was bugging the shit out of me, but I knew I recognized the voice of the Secretary of Defense. It's fucking Barry from RE1. No wonder he's the best character in the game.
There's something really charming about early Dreamcast/PS2-era Japanese games that try to imitate western aesthetics. The character models are doll-like with uncanny valley anime babyfaces, the environments are oddly sterile, and the writing that's as overly-serious as it is absurdly cliche is hysterical. My favorite bit has to be the Street Fighter hitflashes that appear in place of blood when characters get shot. WinBack 2's artstyle is technically more competent, but it ends up looking generic and dull compared to the first game.
Jean-Luc: "For a guy named Solid Snake, you're *way* too flexible." Snake: "Flexible?" Jean-Luc: "Watch this!" Snake: "Hrrrrgh... Colonel, I think I've found a bioroid. No human can move like this guy!"
It was one of the first games I can vividly remember playing. Not Chrono Trigger... not Beyond Oasis, Secret of Evermore or Valley of the Eternal Sun... but freaking Winback is the only game I can actually picture playing as a child! I blame the song Blue by Effiel 65, as it was on TV when I came home from school and popped this into the N64. >__>
@@mist8k Oh yeah that parts a total pain but the part where I threw the controller out the window was during the fight with Muscles Magee who had the rocket launcher, I got lucky on shotgun guy but that dude wrecked me, playing it back on ps2 years later I found him to be easy but back then...good gawd.
I had a buddy who played this on the N64. I messed around with it a bit by renting it I think. Forgot about it for years. He'd taunt me that it was better than MGS because I was a Playstation guy (and he was a contrarian ass). Looking at it now in particular, I'm remembering just how bad it was, clunky in the extreme and frustratingly difficult. The art style also makes Earth Defense Force look like the Sistine Chapel. You know a similarly toned series nobody talks about anymore though? Siphon Filter. That's a blast from the past.
I find it funny how during the serious cutscenes, particularly with Matt's death and Law's sacrifice, the game still uses the colorful flashes of light to indicate characters getting hit. Matt and Law's dramatic deaths having bright red lights on their heads instead of blood spurts or something makes it even harder to take the story seriously, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
"If you had just told us, we might've found a way to help" THAT LINE made me burst into laughter. That was too good. I love your videos Tehsnakerer! I've been recommending them to all my friends!
The dirty Sarcs lost the war because we managed to get far enough in the technology tree to master the art of 'hide behind box and sort of pop out the other side.'
Winback belongs to an extremely specific collection of Japanese games which all have these really arcady set of design philosophies that focus the meta game on speed and precision. God Hand, Devil May Cry and the early Resident Evil games are on the same band. What I love the most about them is the second playthrough, where the skill and reaction time are truly tested.
"I had a feeling you'd make it here, Jean-Luc" Yes Dan, you told Lisa that she should tell Jean-Luc where to find you directly after revealing your evil plan. Who would've guessed.
When I was thinking about things in really loose terms I decided that if I really wanted to I could make the case Space Invaders would be one of the earliest if not the first, but then more for marketing reasons than anything decided that "the birth of stick-to-wall cover mechanics" was a bit too long. It's a bit disingenuous I admit, but I wanted to keep it to cover mechanics in a more modern form.
I mean, a Brit taking an hour or two to talk about obscure and janky games isn't necessarily going to appeal to a large audience, although sometimes a small one has it's benefits.
The thing I appreciate with cover based games is that it punishes you for trying to run and gun. Combine cover and AI that actually stay down as opposed to popping up on occasion just so they can die, and you get a game that forces you to use proper tactics. Brothers In Arms was one of my favorites because of the suppression system, pin an enemy squad down then send a fireteam or outflank on your own. it gets a bit tedious admittedly since every encounter boils down to the 4 f combat system of find, fix, flank, and finish but at the same time it feels like an actual firefight and not just a bunch of enemies that don't care if they die running right at you, or popping up at random times to fire off a few rounds and let you shoot them.
The animation of the magazine and chamber in the lower left is really cool, especially for the time. I remember seeing that in Nintendo Power and being like 'Wow'
I'd love a modern reinterpretation of this game. Imagine if it took some extra inspiration from say Vanquish and/or Resident Evil 6 and 5's combat systems but still kept it's same cheesy story and writing, would be fantastic.
I would say RE6 over RE5 for cover systems. RE5 was nooooot made for cover shooting at all. And it shows in just how clunky it is. In RE6s case, it actually has a cover system like how you'd expect one to work.
The game is like a third person Time Crisis. Kenneth Coleman could be a TC villain like a cross between Derrick Lynch from Crisis Zone and Wild Dog from the whole series. Hell Winback 2 has a full on Time Crisis style intro video.
*[Old man voice]* Baack in my day, you took cover by manually crouching behind the cover! I can't understand kids these days with their fancy cover systems when a simple crouch button can do wonders.
33:46 Just wait until the Operation Winback fanfiction where the Secretary of defense tries to get S.C.A.T killed, and when Jean Lue defeats him, he reveals his dislike of the S.C.A.T team and how he wanted to get rid of them on live televison.
My best friend and I, growing up, used to ride our bikes to blockbuster during the summer, and this was one of those games that we thought we were the only ones in our friend groups that knew about the game, like a niche hidden game that we learned about from one summer day renting it and falling in love with the combat and tactical aspect of it. We were always big fans of typical action movies back in the day, Boondock saints, True Lies, The Rock (w/ Sean Connery), basically anything that had a guy sneaking like a predator into a facility somewhere with a long barrel silence pistol and use it like a badass. So there was something specific about Winback, with that tactical trained specialist main character and the (albeit primitive) feeling of sneaking in like a ghost.. before Splinter Cell for us there was Winback, a game we thought was a hidden gem... and it will still get brought up from time to time to this day if we're going down memory lane. I'll have to send him this video!
The controls for Winback are a bit better on N64, the overuse of one button for a lot of actions makes more sense when you have two face buttons to work with and the N64 analog stick (when not totally busted by Mario Party) is much better suited to fine aiming than a Dualshock.
