[both]
["Yes, it's the savior of the plants! [both]
["The queen of the compost!"] What? [Subtitles by danielsangeo] I knew this day would come. Ever since I started this series, I
knew there was no avoiding THIS game. Let me say right now, this
one is going to get weird. It's going to be weird and long and I'm not sure anyone of us
will be the same afterwards. I've seen lists before about
the weirdest games ever made, and for some reason, this
game never makes the list. This is the black sheep of weird
games. That should say something. So let's fire up "Armed & Delirious", also known as "Dementia" in Europe, also known as "Granny" in Germany. This is a graphic adventure game and it's not one, not two,
but a FIVE CD game! Holy cow! And I'll say right now, they're not
padding things. They really make use of it. Here we go. And for our opening logo, Granny takes
a bite of a mushroom then falls dead or else unconscious with her eyes open, and here's our logo. Then Granny attacks a flower thing... All right, enough logos.
Let's start the game. Okay, I'm going to have to summarize here because this intro video goes
on for over six minutes. Damn. We're treated to a silent
movie of a girl roller skating while somebody is stalking her; then throws something at her head; then an elephant with trumpet
valves embedded in its trunk starts rampaging around the neighborhood; people start freaking out
and running out the house; apparently there was a crime scene
involving a man with gorilla arms; the elephant charges the camera; and we get a transition to inside a house; a narrator starts talking and
introduces members of this family, while saying everything is fine
and people start screaming. From here, the narrator
continues saying things are fine and the family just screams some
more and start attacking each other. So I guess part's not that unusual. This goes on a little while. Next, we get a shot of an empty lab or
something with Morse code being telegraphed. Then a shot of Granny, our intrepid hero. A giant scissors cuts out the house
while a rabbit laughs maniacally. Everyone gets sucked out
into space except for Granny. Then an anthropomorphic rabbit mutters somewhat incoherently
to himself for about a minute. ["No! ["Eh, he's a liar. ["Wait a minute! Th-there is... ["Recipes..."] This only barely makes sense but
I think the simple version is he's trying to make carrot soup and
is using Granny's cookbook to do so. And with that, we begin the game. Granny slides down the stairs and... Stop. We already have a problem. Let's talk about the
sound design to this game. The music is usually in stereo sound, everything else is a dice toss as
to whether it's in mono or stereo. And that doesn't really
matter, but what DOES matter is the mono sound is USUALLY completely
on the LEFT side, NOTHING on the right. [scatting] ["I can't find anything in this mess."] Though not always. Sometimes
it switches sides on its own. Listen to this. I didn't edit a thing. ["Shaking causes me..." ["Where? ["At last! Something to catch things with."] This sounds awful. I had listen to most of
this game with it partially in my left ear. Now I'm going to spare you from that,
but there's no easy way to clean this up, because if I make everything mono, then
the sound effects and dialog go half-value, and if I just go with the left audio, I lose the stereo data from
the music and other sounds. So if anything sounds a
little off in this video, just know that the real thing is even worse. Okay, back to the game. We enter the kitchen and
after faking a seizure, we discover that the rabbit
has stolen Granny's cookbook. Looks like he wants to rub it in, too. Granny is upset about this,
a cow falls from the ceiling, and that's it. Now we're
free to play the game. So wait. Is this the plot? Why are we in space? What were those scissors? I'm a little lost here, guys.
Let's consult the manual. "The Story". Perfect. "The Crotony family enjoy experimenting
on animals and tormenting them. "One of these animals
decided this must stop. "He moved into the Communication
world and started his vengeful voyage. "He created special planets with the help of "an unfriendly group of
men and strange creatures. "The planets you are going to 'bump' into,
are the creation of the insane rabbit; "he used parts and objects
from the villa to create them. "This rabbit wanted to make sure that
his whole family was in one room, "so that it would be easy for him to get
rid of them and throw them into space. "Anyway, things didn't go exactly as planned "and the revenge scheme was executed." I read this all out loud so you don't think
that I'm leaving out key details here. So we're... Okay, whatever. Let's just start playing. I wander around. Granny says
this bottle smells horrible. ["What a disgusting smell!"] I believe her. If we exit, I can open a
safe with a plunger in it. If we try to leave, we have an encounter
right out of "Alone in the Dark". [Granny gasps] If I enter the washroom, Granny
slams her head against the piping, drinks from a bottle, and likes to
inspect things from the business end. Hope there are no guns in the house. She falls on her back again, and says this washing machine/hair
dryer thing is her spaceship. ["My spaceship!"] Okay! If we head upstairs, Granny slams
her head against some books, drinks some more, and falls asleep. I didn't even press a button
here; she has her own agenda. I'm kind of confused by "Bingoary" here. At first I thought those
were giant houseflies, but upon closer inspection,
I can see they're ducks. And look at that. There's
an entrance to the side. And here's the bathroom. The cow from earlier is taking a bath
and performing impromptu singing. I can lay a trap for it, it comes back. And naturally, I can use the toilet. I'm sorry, did you say something? Yeah, that is weird, isn't it? Let's back up a minute. So, the Crotony family... Actually, it's the Crouton family because
the narrator pronounced it earlier. ["...home of the lovely Crouton family..."] Guess that "Y" is silent. The Crouton family is a bunch of
animal torturers. That's bizarre. I mean, animal torture is actually one of the big indicators somebody
might grow up to be a serial killer, so I guess these are the bad guys? Does that mean Granny is
an animal torturer too, or does that just mean that
the rest of her family is? Moving on, the antagonist
is an insane rabbit that has the ability to create worlds
and he has stolen your cookbook which the game implies he wants
so he can make carrot soup. Actually, never mind. We're
going to come back to this, because we have bigger
problems right now. I'm stuck. This is about as far as I
got in the game on my own. Just messing with items, Granny muttering
to herself, and five rooms to explore. Welcome back to 90s adventure gaming. This is exactly the sort of
experience you can expect from an adventure game with no walkthrough. Get 20 minutes in then become hopelessly
lost. The game may as well be over. Well, since we're in the future, a
walkthrough DOES exist for this game, but this is no ordinary walkthrough, oh no. This walkthrough was written
by the lead tester of the game, and essentially just copied by
someone else and put on the Internet. Since it came from the source, that means it's possible no one
figured this out on their own. So who knows how many have gone
down the path of beating this game. But now we have just 433
easy steps to get there. [sigh] Actually I'm lying. Some of
these steps aren't easy at all. So now that I have a walkthrough,
the next step is to drag this pipe. Um. What? Oh, NOW it highlights. And if you JUST click on it like
every other graphic adventure game, it doesn't work. No wonder I didn't figure it out. That's it. I'm starting a list. "Picky object selection". May as well add "Nonsense puzzles".
This came out in '97 so that's a given. Okay, so we drag the pipe,
Granny gives us a pole dance, a bucket falls on her
head, some music starts, Granny dances to the new
beat, and a cactus blooms. This tune is pretty catchy. [singing along]
"Baby, shake me, shake me, baby." Also in the walkthrough, we learned that I was almost there with the
cow back in the bathroom. I not only had to put
the carpet over the hole, but I also had to drag the
trash can and sit on top of it. THEN he falls into the trap and
catapults me at the suntan lotion. So yeah. There's another one for the list. The thing is: This is counterintuitive because if you stand in
the middle of the bathroom, the cow will never come towards
you, like you're scaring it off. But if you sit on top of a trash
can, THEN it comes right at you. [sigh] And with the help of the walkthrough, I learned that there was an
entrance I didn't even find. Look at this screen. Would you have thought
there was an exit in the lower left? I mean, maybe you would have, but the
visual space is suggesting it's closed off. And look. Nothing. No exit. Here's a nice wide exit. Nothing here. Ah! The OTHER lower left exit. I admit, I can be a little
dumb with this stuff, but this game can be particularly
bad with this sort of thing. So we enter the kitchen/home
basketball court, and if it isn't the same damned thing. [strange noises, laughing] Hey, look! A doorway! We
can go outside, right? No. We can't. But we can exit under the stairs!
That's not that intuitive visually. I guess this one is on me, though, since you can see the family
walking there in the intro. Anyway, we continue onward, but not before
I activate the remote-control coffin. Yep, there we go. Actually, I guess I should
get this out of the way. We don't just have a normal inventory. The game likes to go out its way to tell
us Granny is storing everything in her bra, called the "Bra-ventory". Gee. How clever. I don't know why they did this. I mean, God forbid an old woman carry a
big purse. Never heard of that one before. Or just ignore how she's
carrying all this stuff entirely like 95% of all other
graphic adventure games. It brings up this cheap Windows menu, too, that you ALWAYS have to
resize and close again in order to access more than two items. [exhales] ["I can take whatever pill I want.
Whatever pill I desire is mine."] Pill power! So in the bedroom here, Granny tries to
lie down but gets disturbed by an elephant. But not to worry. Granny's old. She
doesn't give up on the first try. If she wants to take a
nap, she'll take a nap. See? I thought that elephant was killed
earlier and mounted on their wall, but I guess there's a lot of
elephants in this neighborhood. Moving on! We dive into the trash can
and end up in your son's secret den. Boy, I hope I'm as mobile as
Granny is when I'm her age! That's a pretty good landing from the vent! Plus her flip off the spring
mattress isn't bad either. Anyway, here we find a tape
recorder with an audio journal on it and get a big part of the plot. This goes on for four minutes
so I'll give the short version. George, the dad of the family,
is having a mid-life crisis. I found it interesting how he's
complaining about his sex-crazed wife, yet we found out earlier he
has sex on the mind so much he ws reading a porno magazine at
the dinner table while he was eating, trying to hide it from everyone. I guess when you're a stud like
George, you can afford to be picky. Anyway, we discover the evil
rabbit approached him in private and offered him a deal to help him set
up a lucrative store in his universe in exchange for giving the rabbit
his villa and everyone inside it. But before George agreed, the rabbit
gave him a tour of his personal universe. So the entire rest of the game is
going to be following in his footsteps, seeing the rabbit's worlds. What we saw earlier was
George closing the deal. This plot has been
bothering me from the start. There's too many things that
ALMOST make sense, then turn left. Like the main plot is the rabbit has stolen
Granny's cookbook so he can make carrot soup. Sure, that's a workable goofy plot. But then the rabbit is also a demigod
with the power to create worlds and shape fate and time itself. ["If you want to enter the Great Rabbit's
offices, you will need a Time Coordinator ["which coordinates between the
right time and the rabbit's time."] Oh. Well, then doesn't the scale of that kind
of take away from the carrot soup plot? So it's up to the Crouton
family to stop the evil rabbit. Except they're a family of animal torturers, so can we really get behind them on this? And why IS the rabbit dealing with
the family of known animal torturers? He has the power to bring down
a giant scissors from space and has already taken everyone
and everything by force. Why is he negotiating with George at all? He's not special. He's a salesman that
reads porno mags at the dinner table. And we already have a causality problem since the manual states that the worlds
are created from the villa's objects. But George was already touring these worlds before the deal was even struck
to give the rabbit his things. This plot is throwing me
a lot of curveballs. Ah, let's keep moving. Maybe this
will get explained by the end. I'm as much in the dark
right now as you are. But thanks to walkthrough power,
we continue onward, find supplies, and get ready to fire up Granny's spaceship. ["This will probably fit around
my throat, or maybe others'."] Yeah, watch out. So we move the minecart track in the
laundry room aside and off we go. From here, the game opens up tremendously. The good news is we can go
to any of the rabbit's worlds and almost all of them
contain sub-worlds within. This is awesome. I can't have
too much of this sort of thing. And hey! It's non-linear!
We can go wherever we want! And that's the problem. See, a famous example of
non-linear gameplay is "Mega Man". You pick whatever order
you fight the bosses in and that determines the game's flow. Well that's a great concept, except
this is a TOTALLY LINEAR GAME. You cannot progress anywhere
unless you have the right items and you can't GET the right items without
going to the worlds in the right order. So yeah, you can wander around, but this is all the ILLUSION
of a non-linear game. And with all these new
worlds come disc swaps. This is a 5-CD game. Now unlike the last game, the
structure of these game files make it impossible for me to
merge everything together. I HAVE to swap the discs...
or at least the emulated ones. The walkthrough says it's structured
to minimize the number of disc swaps so let me tell you there is an
absolute minimum of 25 swaps. Oh my. Let's get going. The first place we need to go
the walkthrough calls "Gazbig". It's a tiny isle in space with
a van crashed into a flagpole. The resident here wants you to leave. He lives with his pig
and translucent chicken. Later, you can save him from freezing
to death. He doesn't seem to care. For now we grab the cloud
gyroscope and continue on our way. This brings us to our first disc swap as we head to the black hole inside a
circular saw blade stuck inside a planet. We end up in a giant toilet and open
trash dump with some ants on the move. [ant barking orders] Ah. They're *army* ants. Well, the living piggy bank
with bloodshot eyes seems happy. In order to progress, we
have to set up a little ramp and click on this shovel four times. Yeah, that's another one for the list. Oh, and we're not done. The
walkthrough specifies how we need to click on this bracket off in the
background by the rest of the junk. Oh yeah! Everyone would
think to click on that! There we go. And we lower the toilet and
head off into the woods. Okay, now am I going crazy or does the music here sound like
the undead music from "WarCraft III"? [loud droning with light percussion] [loud droning] I guess they're both
droning ambient noise, huh? Further into the woods, we come
across two goons taking care of a baby while a kangaroo does laps around us. Granny freaks out a little
bit at the triple-X sign... ["YAABAA VOODOO!"] Granny freaks out about a lot things. And here we have to set a trap so
the kangaroo will step on a lever to catapult Granny to hit a button. But unlike the cow and suntan lotion,
this one requires PRECISION TIMING. I can't emphasize enough how bad this is. Careful timing sandwiched between
non-interactive animations in a graphic adventure
game is such a bad idea. This is not "Super Meat Boy". These types of games, by definition,
are slower and more relaxed in pace. I hate crap like this. Anyway, we turn off the lights, beat up
the thugs, then Granny's incompetence causes her to chuck a baby down a
ravine where it's left for dead. I think this is the first sign that
maybe Granny isn't really the hero. I mean, the tone of this game has been
mostly goofy fun up until this point. But that's a pretty dark turn. You can still hear it crying. [baby crying] Oh well! I guess that's not Granny's
problem! At least in her mind. So with that, we head down
the path to an S&M club of a dominatrix beating up
some aliens or something. Granny ends up joining in
hammering the alien's fingers, then giving the other one a smack, too. This is adding to the vibe that
Granny is not a kind-hearted soul. But, in her defense from
how she talks to herself, she seems to be going with the
flow more than anything else and could be in just sort
of a haze of senility. Don't worry. We'll come back
to that, but we're done here. On a lighter note, we head to the
Door World or whatever this is. I will say I do like a lot of
the little touches in this game. [Granny groans] And from here, we head to Pinball World. This isn't on the map. This
is one of the sub-worlds. Again, I cannot have too
much of this sort of thing. Next, Granny joins the
ranks of Sonic the Hedgehog as a video game character who
also moonlights as a pinball, and our first stop is at a gun shop
where the owner is a little pre-occupied. ["First time, baby! This is my first launch! ["Oh, yeah! Oh, that's good!
I'm walkin' on the Moon, baby! ["I'm in zero-gravity! ["OOH YEAH! SOMEBODY PUT UP
A HEAT SHIELD! BOOM, MAMA! ["OOH, GOD! OOH, YES! WALKIN' ON THE MOON! ["THIS IS ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ["ONE GIANT LEAP FOR SEX!" ["BOOM, BABY!"] Anyway, cowboy astronaut Elvis
comes to the front of the store-- [man hums] --Granny manages to not kill herself, then suddenly we're attacked by a
robber who steals Granny's bra-ventory. And as a quick tip to any
aspiring robbers in the audience, unless you're a Terminator, I would
advise against robbing a gun store. Anyway, Granny is having none of this, so she immediately chases down the
robber and gets her inventory back. ...which kind of makes you wonder
what the point to any of that was. Hu-HEH! Moving on, we head into a bar and here we have yet another puzzle
that would not have occurred to me. First, we have to hand the
beer to the poker player which Granny spits in because
she's a misanthrope, I guess? I mean, a lot of Granny's behavior
you can blame on dementia, but this seems kind of mean
to do to a complete stranger. Anyway, the puzzle here is, you
see that coat rack in the back? Yeah, there, behind the IV drip. Well, you have to add
your coat hanger to that, THEN click on door with
JUST the right timing as the player exits the bathroom
to lock them in there somehow. Who would think to do this?! You can barely see it to start, plus the physics of it don't quite
make sense to me, but whatever. We then take their place at the poker table, Granny plays 52-card pickup, the guy in the wheelchair leaves
because he can tell this is going south, Granny steals something, and we're off! Da-da-DAH! From here we head to Lower
Door World, get a disc swap, and now is a great time to
mention this game is a bastard. See, I originally tried to run
this on Windows 98--didn't happen. But hey! The game DID run on Windows XP! The inventory colors were off and it would crash for EVERY
SINGLE TIME I had to swap the disc, but I could insert the new CD and resume
my progress by re-launching the game. Well not anymore! See, this is Disc 5, and
Disc 5 hates everyone. You can PLAY this game on
XP, but you'll never beat it, so I bit the bullet and did a Windows
95 install, which I tend to be afraid of because it seems like I always have trouble
with the soundcard drivers, but it worked. How fitting that a game about
madness will ONLY run on Windows 95. This is the European
version "Dementia" though. I used to have the USA version, but a
disc got scratched in a stairway accident and if you lose one disc on a
five disc game, it's all over. So maybe this is a regional
problem but I doubt it. Even on 95, if I try to load
this game off of Disc 5 first, you know the one it wants,
it still gets grumpy. And even when I HAVE the right
disc using a CD emulator, Windows 95 doesn't always
detect it until I reboot. Anyway, long story short is, I got it working but this is as stable
as a box of dynamite. No smoking. So we enter a hallway and-- Oh, oops. Yeah, I forgot to do that. Sorry. So we enter a hallway and this sound plays EVERY SINGLE TIME you
come back to the hallway. Let's have a listen. [falsetto cooing and laughing] ["Mm-hmm! Mm-hmm! Mm-hmm..."] Mm-hmm. We also have a guy in a Viking hat holding
some toilet paper moving from door to door. He seems to have his own agenda. And next, we foil a security
camera by jumping back and forth, but only in the right axis. Naturally, that opens the
electronically-locked door. And around here, we get a cutscene of some
not-creepy-at-all anthropomorphic plants acting as underground freedom
fighters working against the rabbit because he wants to add them to the soup. Also here we have what may be the most
telegraphed joke I've seen in my life. The game spends about a minute and a half
explaining that they need a secret agent who is stealthy, skilled,
inconspicuous and so on-- essentially the opposite
of everything Granny is. It's a SLOW and DRAGGING description
of what he's looking for, but the cutscene finally ends
and we enter a police station. By the moon. A moon. Something. Here we get interrogated, roughed
up by a cop who's probably a woman, and get thrown out. And back to another LONG cutscene of the plant discussing how you are
not the right person for the job of spy while the head plant keeps interpreting
the opposite of what he says. This goes on FOREVER! It's the SAME JOKE AS BEFORE! What could be funnier than explaining
what's coming for four minutes? Like hey, if somebody is walking and
slips on a wet floor, that could be funny. But if somebody else says, "Now watch out. "The floor is REALLY wet. "Are you listening? "I said the floor is wet, because it's--" RAAAAAAAAGH! THIS PART IS TERRIBLE! Back to Granny! So not one to be dissuaded, she returns and we listen to sounds of torture
alongside easy-listening music. [easy-listening music, glasses clinking] [easy-listening music, man screaming] Then, according to the walkthrough, we need
to strangle the desk clerk with our scarf. They even go so far as to say you have to
wait until he bends down to get something. Yeah, SAY "GOOD NIGHT"! There. Now I know what you're thinking. Did she cause him to pass out or
did she just straight up murder him? Well, revisiting this area
much later in the game after a lot of things have happened, the clerk's body is still there.
So yeah, I think she killed him. Granny also smashes some guy's head
in so she can steal his telescope. I'm not sure we can blame
all this on dementia anymore. Maybe Granny is just a bad person. OH WELL! Next it's off to the hair salon. [high-pitched giggling] [high-pitched chittering] The hedgehog is getting her spikes trimmed so of course Granny is
going to wreck everything. We have to set a trap for the
hairdresser. This part I understand. I mean, I don't understand the
motive, but I understand the concept: an open manhole for him to fall into. So how do we get him to fall into the trap? Well, we have to sit on the couch, then wait until Granny shifts her legs, then quickly click on the couch again because we have a small time window
AND a small hit-detection also, then her getting up from the
chair and doing absolutely nothing causes the hairdresser
to fall into the manhole. If you don't do it exactly
like this, it won't work. WHO WOULD EVER THINK TO DO THIS?! You wouldn't even do this through dumb
luck because the timing is so specific and there's no visual indication
that you're doing anything different. On the contrary, there's even a red herring
where you can knock a bust off the shelf. Seems like that would be
part of the trap, right? No! That does absolutely nothing! I've had the idea before that, instead
of handing out prison sentences, you could just sentence someone
to beat a game in a specific way before they're let out of prison. Like if you're charged
with aggravated assault, you have to go to prison until you can
beat Super Meat Boy with only one life. And if you MURDER someone, you get to
beat Armed & Delirious with NO HINTS. So with the hairdresser out of the way, the next step is to eliminate the hedgehog. This one is easy. You just tell her her shoes are
the same as yours and insult her. This allows you to reveal
the secret passage-- even though there's no
reason you needed that chair. You could push it forward earlier also. And despite Granny's zippy movements, here she actually walks like a
real old person down the stairs. There's a reason for this coming right up. We enter the room and... ["I think that--" ["It's forbidden to think, talk, ["or do anything that's not in the
interest of finding the passage." ["But--" ["It's forbidden to THINK. Believe
me, it's for your own good."] After the voice releases you, we have
maybe five seconds to solve this puzzle. Nope. Too late. Yeah, now we need to start ALL OVER AGAIN. Take your time, Granny. OH YEAH! TAKE YOUR TIME ON THESE STEPS, TOO! AAH! I CAN'T TAKE IT! THIS GAME'S GRINDING ME DOWN! THAT'S IT! INTERMISSION! INTERMISSION TIME!
This is gaming archeology of the finest caliber.
Freemans mind is entertaining, but playing this game is Ross's legacy that will stand the test of time.
Now this is Game Dungeon alright, fearlessly veering into that weird side of classic gaming whenever possible.
I'd never play this game but I loved seeing it. It's definitely something else.
Watching both parts makes me really wish to get some closure on this - some sort of ama with the developers. What was it? Was it directors take on dementia? Was it just random bullshit or did it have some meaning behind it? Was the gameplay just incompetent design or intentionally bad to emulate dementia or some other mental situation?
So many questions that will probably not going to get answered.
What the fuck is even HAPPENING in this game?
Edit; "I spin and I spin, and this is what happens." Directed by
David Lyncha sick mind.Edit 2; I have no idea what this game is about. No idea if it even has a plot, much less a theme. I don't know how anyone allowed it to get made, or what the initial design phases looked like. I also don't know how someone was able to produce something to fundamentally wrong without anyone questioning or stopping them (outside of someone like George Lucas on Episode 1). Was there ever a script? Was it followed? Is this how the game was meant to be?
I'm open to anyone attempting to explain any aspect of the above.
Holy shiiiiiiiiit I remember this game, I still have the CDs at my parents' house! I remember having to use a guide to get around this game. Holy crap was this game surreal.
Part 2
This was published by Sir-Tech, the developers behind the Wizardry series and Jagged Alliance series.
In case anyone else notices the steam key on the back of Agent 47's head, whatever it was it's already taken by someone
What the fuck was this game?