#paranoiascape

[dhunternugget]

Screaming Mad George pfp (and meme)

[anotherstrongaliens]

I had intended to post this on October 7th, as it was Joji Tani's birthday, but it's relevant and immensely important regardless of the day or calendar year.

Screaming Mad George & Psychosis graced us with the single most incredible video game soundtrack of our (or any) time. That is until I make a tribute game and license every track from Joji's punk band The Mad (a very important musical influence of mine).

00:00​ Symptom

04:18​ Experiment

07:28​ Labyrinth

11:24​ Army Of Eyeballs

13:55​ Intestines

17:53​ Nerves

20:01​ Face Gut

24:11​ Infected

27:38​ Dogma

32:12​ Forgotten

36:24​ Reincarnation

41:07​ Alchemy Puzzle

Soundtrack from the Sony PlayStation game "Paranoia Scape" (also known as "パラノイアエスケープ" in Japan) ripped directly from the audio CD session of the PlayStation disc.

Soundtrack composed and arranged by Joji Tani ( 谷譲治 ) a.k.a. "Screaming Mad George"

[sunkentreasurecove]

[piermanwalter]

I had a long and realistic dream last night about finding an emulated version of a 90s cult classic video game called “Thief’s Apprentice”. The general atmosphere of the game is incredibly bizarre and similar to other weird 90s games like Eastern Mind: Lost Souls of Tong-Nou, Myst, LSD Dream Emulator, Majora’s Mask, and Paranoiascape. It’s an open-world 3D game with the really chunky prototype low-poly graphics and it is famous for almost every moral choice eventually leading to your death. The plot of the game is about a Master Thief raising three lost boys and teaching them how to steal. Master Thief grows old and one day, tells his sons to travel to a prosperous city called Veilheim and steal as much as they can in order to prove themselves. There is a whole lot of story, characterisation, hidden stuff, and plot twists, but the only real goal of the game is to get as rich as possible and bring as much of it back to your ageing father as you can. If you want, you can leave, pick up some colorful broken glass from the front yard and immediately come back, then Master Thief says he is so disappointed in all of you, and the game ends there.

Some other stuff in the game:

You’d expect the city law enforcement to quickly link the new crime wave with the three corpses held together with metal and neon-bright cloth, but everyone looks just as bad so you don’t even stand out.

The entire country is infected with a flesh-eating mutagenic plague, but it isn’t a big deal. In fact, people without any permanent injuries or deformity are seen with suspicion and prejudice. Kaolin, a friendly but lonely kid with blue hair, is one of them.

For single player mode, the in-story explanation is that you go to Veilheim, another bro goes to the island port town of Malassol, and the other bro goes to the religious capital in the mountains, Gehenna. In multiplayer, there is split-screen so you can have one player as Charming Conman crashing a dinner party and convincing all the guests to leave with him to an even better party, another as Greedy Pickpocket taking personal items from the guests when they enter the streets, and the last as Fleetfooted Housebreaker looting the villa now that everyone’s gone, and it’s Lit as Hell.

The music is either non-existent or really bad ambient electronica.

There is a powerful necromancer doing weird stuff in the wastelands surrounding Veilheim.

The plague only affects vertebrates, so insects and snails are seen as “Perfect Forms” and if you are seen hurting them in public you will get arrested. It’s okay to squish maggots, worms, and mosquitoes and things like that if they are literally eating you, though.

Because most people are decomposing, smelling good is considered an important part of polite society. The starting perfume you have access to is “Four Thieves Vinegar” which actually exists in real life. 

Greedy Pickpocket can rotate the angle of the metal slats on his belly like window blinds to hide objects he swallowed or to quickly unload goods.

The Mayor is the richest person in the city and he has the biggest villa and estate, and most normal playthroughs of the game are focused on getting into it.

There is another villa owned by an agriculture scientist that is an endless maze filled with priceless plants, fountains, and golden sunlight that is impossible to leave unless you find the one random greenhouse with a small statue of the Floating Goddess in the corner and pray to her for so long that you start to float too, then you float out a high opened window and that’s how you escape.

If you get too drunk or injured and pass out in the worst part of town, you may wake up chained to a slave ship on its way to Malassol. You can try to escape, but you must do it within 5 minutes of waking up before the ship gets too far from land and you drown trying to swim back. You can choose to stay aboard the ship and try to find your brother in Malassol, but when you reach the island you are immediately forced into a mining minigame that ends when you die.

You can get join a local election and get elected to public office, whereupon you can start your cushy life of white collar crime.

If you play as Charming Conman, you can marry pretty much everyone.

The game doesn’t have save files or player settings after you start, so if you start playing 3-person multiplayer, you’d better be able to keep it up.

The main square of Veilheim is infested with children with plague-induced broken bones held together with thick layers of gauze and ceramic tiles playing street hockey who will kill anyone that’s shorter than them. Nobody knows where they come from. Do not crouch in front of them or you will be beaten to death. There is a plot event where the Hockey Children completely overrun the entire plaza and judicial district, and the other children are forced to hide on top of huge stone pillars.

There is another plot event when an army of zealots from Gehenna invade Veilheim to purify the city of the plague, and depending on what you do to stop them, such as deliberately getting arrested to inform the city guards, walking way out into the wastelands to tell the Necromancer, sabotaging the army’s supplies yourself, or nothing, vast sections of the city might be destroyed or abandoned.

If you look hard in the Mayor’s records, you can find out that Greedy Pickpocket used to be a foreign princess who refused an arranged marriage with the Mayor’s son so he had her killed. Later, the corpse was revived by the plague, but Pickpocket is so unrecognisably rotten and was raised as a boy for so long that he doesn’t really care.

There is a fetch quest where a group of debutante girlfriends removed their organs to fit into their fashionably tight corsets, but they lost them all by accident. 

You can play the entire game without stealing anything and get rich from legitimate business, but your dad will still be disappointed in you.

The only bro capable of fast travel and teleporting between warp points is, logically, Fleetfooted Housebreaker.

Malassol is a slave/prison colony and Gehenna is obsessed with remaining plague-free to the point of burning anyone with obvious injuries alive, so it’s implied that if you play single-player, your brothers both die.

The Necromancer is actually responsible for the plague and killing him will halt his evil magic, but if you do, the everyone suddenly feels the horrible pain from their injuries and anyone whose bodies can’t function without the magic in the plague dies, including you.

Master Thief is the single oldest living being and it turns out that he and Necromancer used to be so close that when Master Thief got mortally wounded, Necromancer created the plague just to keep him alive, but it got out of hand and here we are today.

Master Thief and Mayor of Veilheim have a secret deal where the Mayor kills people, imbues their corpses with strange magic, and gives them to Master Thief to train. The message “You found 12 AMBER BEADS ... but you can’t possibly carry anything more.” actually teleports the items into the Mayor’s estate. You can find the room if you look hard enough, but it won’t have any significance unless you remember the exact items you couldn’t carry.

It’s implied that Master Thief had an emotional crisis after watching the children murdered by the Mayor being revived as malformed zombies by the Necromancer’s plague, and he sends you to Veilheim to wreck both of their plans as revenge.

Even though the game as a whole is bleak and gruesome, the interactions between the brothers are genuinely cute.

I also dreamed of looking at Thief’s Apprentice Let’s Plays on youtube and finding the “Grand Theft Auto: Veilheim” challenge where you had to steal the Horseless Rockgrease Carriage belonging to an influential nobleman and rampage for as long as possible without getting off. This is challenging because the carriage consumes rockgrease extremely quickly, you can’t refuel without getting off unless the fuel is already in properly-sized tanks, the carriage is extremely valuable so the instant you are seen with it sends the city guards on high alert, and the carriage itself will explode if it hits anything too hard. The world record so far is 16 hours 11 minutes and 41 seconds, done by befriending the nobleman to secretly store enormous quantities of fuel all over his estate and escaping into the wastelands.

There’s also stupid edits comparing Master Thief to Master Chief. 

[slowly-lowered]

[best-of-game-grumps]

Arin: Hitting those fucking fish things, hitting the spermies. GOTTY! Got the ball!

Dan: Nicely. Done.

Arin: Fuck yeah dude. Man that was easy. And I got almost a million points

Dan: Thank God fish... Aren't into cash.

Arin: Like they're stealing my cash?

Dan: Yeah, well...

[pause]

Dan: Alright. I'm gonna be honest with you. I fell asleep for a second there, I had like a 2 second dream.

Arin: [laughing] Yeah?

Dan: That like... Fish were stealing stuff.

Arin: [laughter]

Dan: And then when I woke up I was like man, could you imagine if like, they didn't just want your valuables, they wanted cash? And then I said it out like and I was like, Arin didn't- I dreamed that. Arin didn't see any of that fish thing that I just went through.

Arin: [still laughing] Went through?

Dan: That was the weirdest experience.

Arin: Fucking journey that I've been on.

Dan: Yeah, dude I've been places since the clock turned 14 minutes and 5 seconds.

Clip starts at 13:10

[yungcrybby-anonymousbosch666]

[violentvideo]