You can't live without a spinal cord son, nothing unnatural about that

Violence is as American as apple pie and low SAT scores!

is my personal favorite

i learned about the game from a best-of list of something awful let's plays.

Joel

DansGaming back in 2011
holy shit where did the time go

I don't really think you could, at least not as earnestly as it was. Harvester was made in reaction to the movement against violence in game and call for censorship like old people did for every other emerging piece of entertainment. Nowadays that outcry just doesn't really exist, beside literally illegal acts you can depict whatever you want in your game with zero issue. It's a product of its time, both for better and worse.

FUCK

Retsupurae, shame that they turned shit later on

beside literally illegal acts you can depict whatever you want in your game with zero issue

It's a product of its time, both for better and worse.

honestly with how many games are committee designed now you can argue that we don't really see much shit that actually tries to be controversial or satirical nowadays it's all played incredibly fucking safe now and made to be as bland and inoffensive to every part of human society

Damn what was that shooter this is from

Shit was fucking great in 1994

amen, aniki

Iirc it was listed on a website I found when I was looking for weird games with an "off" feeling after watching a video of D2 (the Dreamcast game). Cannot find the article. I believe the first YT video I saw was an uncommentated longplay of it.

world of longplays

Oldfags from our streaming group back in 2009, when Twitch was still called Justin.Tv. None of us made it as big name streamers so don't ask.

we don't really see much shit that actually tries to be controversial or satirical nowadays

Shock value is not really as viable of a marketing strategy as it used to be. Back then whatever kind of violence you were exposed to usually came from seedier sources like late night television or grindhouse theatres, and even when presented as real a lot of that was faked. Today you can literally just go to liveleaks within seconds and see genuine dismemberment within seconds, people are just desenitized to violence now since the internet made it accessible for anyone whenever.

It mostly works out that people don't really have that deep of a stomach for violence.
If Call of Duty had people's brains explode and paint the inside of rooms and leak blood and shit out on the ground after death, it would definitely be edgier and more offensive and something unique, but the number of people that'd like that would be limited.

They tried making a new Tex Avery game when GOG was still about old games. Probably didn't pan out well.

There are plenty of legal things that you can't depict in games without being kicked off stores and payment processors, anon.

Are Harvester and Phantasmagoria 2 the only good FMV games ever made?

Played I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, got recc'd Harvester afterwards (among other games I never finished).
Still think IHNMAIMS is one of the best point and clicks ever made.

Retsupurae but I watched Broteam play it.

Unironically a cracked.com article from 15 years ago

we don't really see much shit that actually tries to be controversial or satirical nowadays

Have you heard of "indie games"

Yahtzee mentioned it once while he was playing Phantasmogoria

You always were a kidder, anon.

Was that an invitation?

Mr. Pottsdam is literally me

Pretty much yeah, I liked Killing Time and the first Phantasmagoria but I don't recommend them

The FMV segments from Sewer Shark are fun, but the game itself sucks. It wouldn't be so bad if not for the fuck u difficulty.

I'd add GK2 and Shivers

I love bad mojo, but I guess it might not count as only the cutscenes are fmv.

Nowadays that outcry just doesn't really exist, beside literally illegal acts you can depict whatever you want in your game with zero issue

Well thats not true, we know what you arent allowed to have in big video games nowadays. But if we got too into that and what Harvester's spiritual successor would need to depict in order to be rebellious, we're going to see a lot of chinese bot farms, - I mean redditors, - I mean legitimately users pile in and cry about Anon Babble or Asmongold or whatever.

Anon Babble many years ago

Steve looks so freakishly similar to Kyle Maclachlan in Blue Velvet

I didn't learn it from a Youtuber as much as I did seeing it in magazine ads when I was a teenager back in the mid-90s. The ads got a lot of controversy because of how gory they were, I remember buying it sometime in early 1997 after seeing this ad. The game itself was surreal to me as a Frenchman because it felt like a spot-on parody of how we envision Americans, except done by Americans.

Based, same here. Pretty sure that article had IHNMAIMS and Harvester on the same cursed list, along with shit like LSD: Dream Emulator and maybe The Path? Those old cracked lists were basically proto-YouTube video essays but more unhinged.

I actually don't remember. I think I just saw that it was LE MOST FUCKED UP GAME ever a while ago. It's probably the most unnerving game I've ever played

Surreal horror like this is what gets me. Everyone acts like Harvester is so cheesy and silly but that's part of what makes it effective. This scene is funny but it's also horrific, the indifference from everyone but Steve contrasted with the extreme gore makes it feel like a nightmare. One of the only games to ever really unsettle me, though the ending kinda drops the ball.

Why is there so much combat in the lodge shit turns into a souls game

I genuinely miss the earnest attempts at shock horror/humour of the 90s. It was a kind of western eroguro, where nothing is really meant to be taken seriously, except within itself, like grindcore music. Except without so much of the "ero". More self-aware than the gorefests of the 80s, less risk averse than the 00s. Zoomers could never.

I speak zero fronch lemme try and see how I get this by just how many old magazine ads I remember

Some advice, don't look at the next page.

We warned you/we tried to stop you.

That's how it'd be in the mags I remember

everything said by the cowboy was a fucking golden

I think game developers then could get away with it because it was a very niche community and it wasn't easily accessible by most people, so there was little risk of actually pissing off people who actually do hold power. Keep in mind that the average household could not comfortably afford a computer (at least here), let alone one with good computing power and upgrades until the early 2000s and it was a serious investment, so most families that did have one used it strictly for business. I was actually shocked to find out Americans had so much online presence in the 90s because before we switched to the Euro, a lot of tech was always charged double because it had to be custom fitted for our market.
Close, it's more like : "A bit advice : Take a breath of fresh air before the next page." and then it goes "We warned you."

The Saturday Crapshoot series, before PCGamer went to shit.

Nice, at least some was right, thanks fronch anon
Man I miss old game mags