Bad and Unfinished AAA Video Games

Use my code: Eruption at checkout or this link displate.com/promo/austineruption/?art=63e284c03f0… to get 20%off 2-3 Displates and 30% off 3+ Displates. Gonna order another soon! FRIENDS. IT IS TIME. Bad and Unfinished AAA Video Games are EVERYWHERE. It's been a hot minute since I did a video going into something just inherently "bad" with little wiggle room, but I manage to toss a few personal disappointments in here too cause I'm a nut. Lemme know what other Bad AAAs you think of! There's ALWAYS more.

This video is just a retrospective on which games flooded GameStop's used game wall

It’s hilarious and sad that “AAA” being a label for quality means almost nothing now once they used patches and “live-services” as an excuse and crutch to release unfinished games.

I still feel bad for John Romero in regards to the marketing campaign of Daikatana. Romero seems like a genuinely nice guy, and has said in multiple interviews after the fact that he didn't actually want that ad to run but was talked into it and has regretted it ever since.

Always love whenever I get to bring this factoid up: the Switch is probably one of if not the only console that actually lets you update games offline through other people, completely legitimately. It's the "match with local versions" option in the + menu. Very niche, I know, but it's genuinely great that there's an official way to share updates for games completely offline, and people very rarely talk about it.

Interestingly a young developer played Trespasser and really liked the physics part of knocking crates over. His name was Gabe Newell.

Funny thing about Angel of Darkness: Many say it's the game that killed the franchise, but I personally can pinpoint a singular moment within the game that killed it for me. There's a dev interview video in the menu and I watched it before playing the game (I know, kinda weird since it could have spoilers, but I was cleaning my room so figured I'd put it on to get hyped) There's a part in it where a guy goes "When we were working on this game, we wrote a book. The story of this game [dramatic pause] is only the first few chapters of that book." Then it shows him slowly closing a book and looking off into the distance in a "I'm so deep" way. I would give ANYTHING to get my hands on that book lol.

The worst thing about Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness was the "experience" system. The game forced you to do a pointless parcour then said "you're stronger now, you can open the door". 😆

Trespasser has an active modding scene. Most of it is making the game run better and reintroduce cut content. Some of the game's original developers even contributed at points. The game is abandonware and downloads are all over the internet if anyone is interested.

I worked in a "AAA" mobile game developer (w/ a AAA sister publisher-company) back in 2011, and they have been using the term way back then. They describe it as "A-tier" allocation of resources in 3 fronts, A-Time, A-Money, A-Marketing, hence AAA.

One of the funniest things I ever learned about Jurrasic Park Tresspasser was how the damage from melee was calculated. IIRC, it was based on the weight of the item, and one of the heaviest items that you could pick up and use was a human skull in the first area that, according to the game engine, weighed 1000 lbs and could theoretically 1 hit any dinosaur in the game... but it was awkward as hell to hold and held items didn't transition to new levels (iirc, no items transferred between levels). BTW, melee weapons were WORTHLESS in Trespasser because every "proper' melee weapon had a weight of 1. Meaning that you'd be swinging for days, since the most dinos had health in the hundreds. Another goofy thing was that they couldn't get the attack animations to tie with the damage, so they just put a "damage strip" inside the mouths of enemies that would damage you if it collided with your hitbox and would vanish if the dino had their mouth closed, but was ALWAYS present if the dinos' mouth was open, meaning you could die from accidentally walking a dinos' mouth. You could manually close a dead dinos mouth, which was strongly advised, because you never knew if you'd have to backtrack through an area for more guns.

The digression about day-one patches is really interesting with the announcement that FFXVI won't have any sort of day-one patch, the game you play is the game printed on the disc. Crazy how rare that is these days.

As a game developer I appreciate that Austin criticizes "disaster games" in a way that doesn't directly disparage the people who made it.

As Yahtzee recently said. We wonder why this happens when we always insist on the most brand new, untested, resource guzzling graphics engines Seriously, maybe we don't need perfect photorealism if games keep taking 19 years and coming out like this!

This Jurrasic Park to MK "chest" transition is godlike

Hey Austin, it really shows you've been making videos for 10 years, your content is high quality and always fun to watch. I actually wouldn't mind even longer analysis of video games by you. For example, you spend about 3/4 minutes on each game in this video but I love the videos like the Balan Wonderworld and Kakarot videos where you REALLY dive in. In fact, I like your editing and personality to the point where I'd watch you talk about pretty much anything.

“NARC…where you play as…a NARC.” Idk why but that had me laughing

Jurassic Park Trespasser looks like it was supposed to be a modern VR game...which could be really cool

I found a full brand new copy of Agents of Mayhem for £10 on the year of release. The worst part is that it wasn't NECESSARILY a bad game, it didn't feel bad to play, it just made some bad decisions. It wasn't broken and unplayable, it was made on a good foundation. It just didn't choose to go as far as it wanted to go and left itself feeling shallow

It's going to be a real good Matt McMuscles video of "What Happened" on Redfall.