Dispatch | Fully Ramblomatic

This patreon seriously needs to make a collection tab of just Fully Ramblomatic so I can autoplay them.

I think "choices matter" games probably work best when they stick to one of two paths: 1) There are many completely different story endings which could range from "you die a week into your quest" to "you rule the world and live happily ever after". This doesn't really work in graphics-intensive games because a player who plays the game once might only see 10% of the content or less, and covering a lot of possible paths means creating a huge amount of video, audio etc. This path therefore tends to show up in low-graphics games like visual novels (cf. Long Live The Queen) 2) The story is largely fixed but acts as a spine on which character interactions and subplots can hang, so that the ending is largely the same every time but the group of characters who experience it may be very different and the path taken to get there may also be very different. This shows up in a lot of Western RPGs like The Witcher 3 and various Bioware games. I think Dragon Age: Origins is one of the best examples (assuming you get to the end, the game always ends with your party killing the Archdemon on top of a castle, but who kills it, what happens to the party etc. can be very different - you could have a member of an oppressed minority bravely sacrificing themselves for a country that hated them, a Machiavellian noble cheating death and taking power over the country, an NPC party member giving his life to spare his beloved, or a villain redeeming himself by sacrificing his life). It sounds like Dispatch goes this route, but maybe needs to have more variety in what can happen in the subplots/character interactions to differentiate one playthrough from another.

Fully Ramblomatic highly pretentious experimental prog rock track of the week: The Existence Of The Concept Of Causality by Sensible Dimension (from their album The Juxtaposition Of The Mundane And The Fantastical )

Only issues I had with the game were the unskippable dialog (generally only an issue if I'm trying to replay a section) and the unpredictability of the dispatch section. I mean you could generally tell what kind of heroes should be sent, but in some cases you only needed one specific hero which wasn't obvious in advance. Also, not knowing what the calls would be in advance means you might not have a hero with the required stats ready. In the very last chapter I needed a "smart" hero for one particular job. But the plot had limited me to only 3 heroes - all of which came with minimal intelligence and I hadn't boosted it for them at all.

Dispatch reminded me what I enjoyed about the first Telltale games. Then it topped them by adding an actual *game*. I just hope they don't run it into the ground with sequels and spin offs bereft of originality.

Didn't Scalzi write the book mentioned in the end credits? :)

Taking the outro gag into consideration, I'd honestly be keen to have a critical feminist view of the game. Something Jenna or Jess could offer maybe? But yeh, those damn 8008ies are mighty distracting...

Yahtzee's in rare form on this one.