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GamesRadar
Technology
Scott McCrae

Death Stranding gets its own Twitch Plays Pokemon moment as streamer turns the whole game into cargo that chat has to keep balanced: "Eyes forward, Sam"

Death Stranding.

A streamer has taken immersion to the extreme with their Death Stranding stream, which allows the stream itself to lose balance alongside Sam Porter Bridges.

While Death Stranding is filled to the brim with classic Hideo Kojima idiosyncrasies, including its bizarre plot and worldbuilding, one of the most interesting aspects of the game, in my opinion, is how it makes the act of simply walking around a central mechanic. As the protagonist Sam piled more cargo onto his back, it became harder to keep your balance, especially when travelling over uneven terrain, so you could hold down the triggers to have him hang on to his bag straps and balance himself (which actually works, I've discovered in the time since, who'd have thunk).

Due to that mechanic, Death Stranding is quite immersive, but clearly not immersive enough for some. Twitch streamer Shindigs is clearly one of those as they devised a scheme to make the balancing act even tougher in a way that would make Twitch Plays Pokemon blush. While not as elaborate as Pokemon (there's probably too many buttons for that to work properly), Shindig adapted the balancing act to the stream.

While Shindigs streamed, the video would gradually tilt over forcing chat to spam L or R to rebalance the stream in the corresponding direction, with an alert on screen telling the chat which letter to spam to make it work. Granted I can't tell if this also gives the power for chat to push the stream over at will or if they can only interact when the tilt occurs, because that could get wild if the chat is filled out. At the very least, it's a motion sickness nightmare from the 25 second clip posted to Twitter, so I can only imagine how hellish playing the entire game like this would be.

Hideo Kojima says he makes games because an HR person told him to be creative after he decided job-hunting is "a place where lies meet lies": "I was a Showa era detective trying to solve a murder case."

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