This was a fun one for me and was my first time trying a totally improvised video essay. It didn’t go exactly as planned and required some reshoots but I still think it’s a great topic and a great video. What are your thoughts?

My older sister always ignored the races when we played the need for speed games as kids so she could go 'house shopping' and pick out where she would live in that world. It used to drive me crazy but when I got a bit older I found myself doing the same thing and making up my own little stories and characters when I got tired of racing

Austin is such a king of slowing down, I'm surprised he even owns a racing game

Just wanted to leave a comment to appreciate this kind of content your channel is a goldmine for random video game shit like this that no one else focuses on I love it

The billboards in Remastered replace actual for-sale ad space in the original release, up to and including ads for the Obama campaign. Burger King, the clothing brand Diesel, XM radio shows, and car brands, all bought space.

when i was a kid playing need for speed with my brother, my fav thing to do in the game (outside of spectacularly crashing my car) was to leave the road and drive in a the countryside until i found a nice enough spot where i would just stop and just…. soak the atmosphere in. i spend way too long looking at random shit in this game lmao

10:10

Some of my favorite gaming memories is being a kid and exploring the map of need for speed underground with my cousin.

As someone who has worked on a QA team for a racing game, I have spent a lot of time looking at this kind of stuff. This really captures the heavily curated falseness that is very particular to racing game environments.

I’m sitting here watching an Any Austin video. If he had his way I would ignore the hair clips in his hair. How crazy is that?

I feel like the Tony Hawk games are ripe for this kind of analysis. Can't tell you how much time I spent in American Wasteland and Underground 1/2 just wandering around and looking at stuff.

The hair clips really elevate the look 👌

i love the sort of raw literalist outlook you like to have in video games, like "what if this place were reality? does this snack machine make sense? does this hallway make sense?"

You should do a video on games that really hone in on unreasonably realistic aspects of worlds in video games. The powerlines spurred an idea - how many games showed you exactly how things worked, but we were too busy playing to look at?

My sister and I used to roleplay random storylines in burnout and completely ignore the races. We would drive around to where we weren't supposed to go and listen to the soundtrack that had the music she liked at the time. This brought me back to a memory I didn't even remember I had, and that's one of the best things from your channel.

Burnout Paradise had one of the most surreal, uncanny moments in gaming: On PS3 they integrated your PS Home avatar onto the in game billboards (if you had one). It somehow both added and removed immersion at the same time. I can't even find search results that prove they did this so it could just be a mandela hallucination.

It's kind of crazy seeing someone else interested in this incredibly hyper-specific topic. As a kid, I would

Oh this is going to be a million sub channel in no time

This kind of thing has been on my mind, lately, playing Splatoon 3. There's a huge amount of detail on the multiplayer stages that you really don't have time to appreciate during matches. A ton of attention seems to have been put into the design, to allow players to quickly interpret the environment as a bunch of surfaces relevant to painting and traversing them. When I use Recon Mode to just hang out and explore a stage, though, I notice details, decorations, or realize what some part of the level geometry is actually meant to be, that I've been rushing past so many times.

When you mentioned GTA IV, it made me think about how GTA San Andreas does it. In some places, they really go above and beyond to make things be right, but then other times it looks like they just didn't bother at all. Kind of makes it even more fun to explore, because now it can be rewarding in two different ways.