Jaffa Series Nostalgia - A Detailed Review PDF

It was actually quite a nostalgic week for me. On the 5th a sequel to the Oil Toil animation was released. On the 6th the main channel put out an extra long TTT, that both referenced a lot of their TTT history and was built on a Sphax Minecraft map. On the 7th the main channel made two new videos on...

It was actually quite a nostalgic week for me. On the 5th a sequel to the Oil Toil animation was released. On the 6th the main channel put out an extra long TTT, that both referenced a lot of their TTT history and was built on a Sphax Minecraft map. On the 7th the main channel made two new videos on Little Inferno. I was giddy as a kid again! First up, there were of course a bunch of jokes that went over my head as a kid. Things such as the “Ograsmic Materials” chest or the “love yourself,” “at least twice a day.” Although, it wasn’t all sex and poltics that I didn’t catch onto. There were also references to Minecraft that I missed out on. Things such as a spleef joke in the session where they traded employees, or how Swiftwolf’s Rending Gale didn’t bother me at all as a kid but now I keep thinking they switched to Creative Mode. There’s even a few internal Yogs nods I missed, such as “when I grow up I want to be a potato” and frequent SOI name drops. Even if I didn’t get every joke, it's wild how much these guys shaped my humor. I wasn’t paying attention to the episode titles, and ended up making the “Ghastards” joke a split second before Simon. I pulled a similar thing during Site Bee with “Blab.” I was also surprised by just how omnipresent SipsCo was in the series. REDACTED first showed up in episode 4, and at least one of them would show up in a scripted role every single session up until the giant head fiasco. Since the giant head, they joined on full time and appeared every episode in more non-scripted roles. I had it in my head that they didn’t show up at all, or much, until the Pig Island storyline, but I was wrong! I always gave Sips shit for being bad at acting in Whale Lords, but looking back he was always giggly and couldn’t keep a straight face. My sense of progression for the series was actually quite off. Sure it took them 92 episodes (well 82 technically) to make the first Jaffa, but other points of progress felt way faster. They started laying the foundations in episode 5, and finished their Equivalent Exchange machine in episode 7. Both of those felt like they happened much later in the series to me. It’s wild how much Minecraft has changed since then. There were so many moments where I would scream in my head something along the lines of “just use a hopper to deal with overflow,” and the like. These comments were always made in the context of “oh shit that didn’t exist yet” but they still kept cropping up. Perhaps the most dramatic example was Duncan using some sort of block underneath power rails to turn them on. My initial reaction was “why isn’t he using redstone blocks” before remembering that those weren’t around. This mod predicted a vanilla feature. Not an uncommon occurrence, but a neat one to spot! It’s also interesting going back to a time when Not Enough Items/Too Many Items/Just Enough Items was so much in its infancy. It took around 60-80 episodes for Lewis or Simon to ever bother using it. They’d consistently say things like “what’s the recipe,” “how do I make this,” despite having a guide *right there.* It's become second nature to use that mod for them at this point, so it's weird to see them learning it for the first time. It was cool seeing Sphax again. It's a really nostalgic pack, and one of the few to recognize that if you up the pixel count on a texture you’ve got to come up with an actual style to deal with the squared-off nature of blocks. An interesting element of it was the randomized colors/skins for mobs. I remembered things like Zombies, Creepers, and Cows (I even thought Vanilla Creepers acted like that for a while,) but I had forgotten about stuff like Squids, Spiders, and Cakes being randomized as well. I also missed how some of the blocks had a subtle sparkle or shimmer animation, most notably Diamonds. One line of the series also got me curious. Did Duncan work on Sphax? There’s one point where he says something along the lines of “we haven’t finished the textures for those yet.” Now he could just be using “we” in the royal sense, or be talking about downloading the files from someone else, but he *does* have an art degree and made a bunch of art for the Yogs back in the day, and Sphax’s mod textures were community driven. Just an odd thing that never occurred to me and I never noticed. There were a lot of great builds and jokes from the series that stuck vividly in my memory, and it's wild how many of them there are compared to other series from the Yogs. Simon beating Lewis with a stick, Simon throwing Duncan in a Quarry and a Zombie pushing him in just after. The giant dirt pernus Duncan built. The giant Sjin head in the basement. Simon’s pig statue and pig tiki bar. Creeper on the roof. “Why is his belt below his ass!” There’s also a few moments that had slipped my memory, but came flooding back when the first line was spoken or the first block was placed. Lewis and Sjin’s romantic sunset dinner. The Chickens that nested in the power cables. The Nether Portal on top of the pub (I remembered it was in that space, but forgot they put it in the sign.) Throughout all of middle and high school, I’d think of Sjin’s way of saying “pipette” everytime we had a lab, yet I somehow lost that over college. There’s also some things that I had zero memory of, yet they seemed like things I should’ve recognized. The Repair Talisman. There being more than one quarry in the basement. Simon’s pig having a ribcage (I remembered the dick though!) The Cow Slug I only remembered from that TTT episode from around a year back, and I had no memory of the Sugar Cane farm. When it comes to memories though, there’s one that colored my view of the series so insanely. In episode 37 there’s a bit where Simon and Duncan enter a cave together. Duncan burns to death, a Creeper blows up Simon while he watches his loot, and the two of them have to rush to get their shit back. For some reason, this planted the idea in my head that they died in the series a lot, and nearly lost their loot in caves a lot. In reality, it only happened like this once. I’m not sure whether I rewatched that scene a lot as a kid, or if the stress of losing progress was more intense the first time I experienced it, but for some reason I had pegged that as a common occurrence. I have no better place to put this, buy oh my god the Coke Ovens suuuuuuucked. Oddly enough, both building the multiblock and what it provides to gameplay isn’t all too different to Tinker’s Construct, which is my favorite mod ever, yet I hate the Coke Ovens with a passion. Even as a kid with no knowledge of Minecraft, I knew it was over complicating the rails recipe to a point where it was no longer fun. So you know what, let's keep reviewing mods. Completely went over my head as a kid that they had more than one pipe mod, I thought it was all the same. And then there’s Equivalent Exchange. That mod gets a lot of bad rap for being overpowered, and it is, but I’ll give ‘em credit where credit is due - banning ores from the EMC machine was a smart move, especially given the Macerator could double what you got out of them. If ores and ingots had the same EMC value, you could just skip smelting and create the ingots right away. If one or two ingots cost more EMC than ores, you could keep cycling your ingots back into ore and end up with infinite metal. If ores cost more than two ingots you could again skip the smelting step.If ores cost more than one ingot, but less than two, duplication would be more complicated and less efficient but still possible. There’s no good way to implement it, so smart move blocking it! We finished up the original Jaffa Factory on the 14th. That then brought us to Site Bee. Funny enough, my brother had never actually seen Site Bee before. He had found it too boring to finish back in the day, and he gave up on the last five episodes for this rewatch. Given it was the first (or second, depending on how you count it’s relationship to Jaffa) Minecraft Let’s Play, or even Let’s Play in general, I had ever seen it didn’t bug me much at the time. Looking back now, I can totally see why everyone calls this the worst Yogs-Minecraft series. Site Bee is so booorrriing. The problem seems to be that they left in too much dead air. Often three or four of them working together would build one or two modded blocks a session, and not figure out how it worked until the break between episodes. They’d spend a lot of time just running around the compound ignoring what was happening and most of the progress would happen off screen. There were times when Jaffa Factory’s progress was slow, but they always had interesting scripted stories or hilarious jokes and discussions to carry things. Site Bee they just kind of clammed up and stopped playing. I know a lot of people like to blame the bees, but I’m not entirely sure that’s it. I have actual memories of the bee mod on Feed The World, unlike Site Bee, for which I only remembered the lava tower as they started building it. I also really enjoyed the recent Sky Bees on Duncan’s channel a few years back. Neither bees in general nor that specific bee mod seem to be the problem. The Yogs just had no interest in the mod and the editors couldn’t salvage the footage. That said, there’s a few things about Site Bee I’d like to point out. First off there are *way* more angry zombies than I remember. I thought they were supposed to be rare. Second, the tree half of the bee mod is actually really cool, and I remember Sjin’s experiments with those wood types on his own channel being fun. Third, we joke about how the Yogs never put roofs on their bases, but Site Bee might be the worst example. They literally built half of a roof, stopped, then abandoned the series. And finally I find it quite hilarious that one of Lewis’ last lines of the run is “goddammit, everyone’s sick of bees.”