Adaptive Difficulty Is Kinda Cool

 

Whenever a hard game hits the scene there is usually a debate that sparks regarding difficulty in video games.  The people struggling want options, the people who are happy think devs should be free to not include them and the whole thing devolves into an angry mess where people are being called nasty names and accusations of oppression and ableism are being thrown around like candy by the terminally online, it’s a fuckin mess

My attitude to the whole thing is that difficulty options are usually poorly implemented and are an outdated idea that probably shouldn’t be used.  Games should have a baseline experience aimed at all players, so everyone can get the ending or the story and then post-game extra stuff to test the players that want to go further.  Mario 64 is a good example of what I mean here where getting 70 stars to see the ending is quite easy but if you’re pushing to 120 there’s some tricky stuff to deal with. Obviously the opinion is more nuanced than that but for the sake of this post, this simple version will do.

The one facet of this debate I haven’t considered though is adaptive difficulty, games that get harder or easier based on the performance of the player.  It’s not a thing that gets talked about very often but it’s such a cool way of serving both audiences that I’m surprised it’s not used more often.  Games that use this even sometimes have traditional modes AS WELL to set the starting level of difficulty and maybe to prevent it dipping below a certain point.  It’s probably a pain in the ass to implement because you have to track a bunch of factors that controls the difficulty but I feel like this method would stop the whiners while also allowing the hard core players to swing their e-dicks around. 

I caught a shot of adaptive difficulty while playing Aero Fighters the other night and thought it was a neat part of the game I hadn’t previously known about while trying to 1cc it.  I was going through the game on an emulator and saving states in order to practice parts of the game I was struggling with.  Of course, while stating I’m not dying and I’m barely using bombs and about 5 stages in I noticed the game felt just impossibly hard, way harder than I was used to.  I then realized that the game was taking stock of my lives and bombs at the end of each stage and making the game harder or easier based on those numbers.  Going into stage 5 with 5 bombs and 3 lives and the enemies are all shooting like mad men with bullets on fast forward but with no lives and no bombs the enemy pilots age 90 years and get brain damage.  Cool for the players who are cracked at the game because that high score from not continuing represents a greater struggle but if you kinda suck a shmups, a win might still be open to you.  From my perspective trying to 1cc it, it poses an interesting additional mechanic to contend with where I can maybe justify spamming bombs or dying tactically to win on one coin which is not something I usually have to think about.

The first time I remember being conscious of an adaptive difficulty was back in 2008 when Left4Dead came out.  Valve named it “the director” and if my memory isn’t faulty it changed things such as health items, ammo, number of zombies and number of special infected.  It also had traditional difficulty settings and I’m not sure what those affected given the presence of the director but it’s a good example of having both systems in play. I don’t remember thinking that the director had a huge effect on gameplay with the base difficulty being more of a factor in success or failure but it’s cool feature to include in a game that had such a limited amount of actual content. 

A really interesting example of adaptive AI is probably the one found in Resident Evil 4.  I was barely even aware of its existence until I found a YouTube about RE4 speedrun and the narrator touched on it there.  From what I can tell it affects things like enemy aggressiveness, damage taken(?), item drops and stuff like that.  What makes it so interesting is that you would THINK that speedrunners want to run on easy, because an easier game is surely faster to clear, right? But my current understanding is the preferred setting is actually Professional.  Pro mode locks the adaptive difficulty to its highest point in an unmoving state and thus allows for runners to play the game in a more predictable and easily routeable way.  I’ve never once heard of anyone complaining about the challenge behind RE4 so whatever Capcom were cooking, the people are loving it. 

So maybe devs should use more adaptive methods of dictating game challenge, maybe with a setting at the start so more skilled players don’t dip into the easy stuff if things go tits up for them.  The only other alternative I think works is giving players full control over aspects of the difficulty from the options menu but I only enjoy this method when then options allow for insane jacking of numbers for challenge runners.  Really though, at the end of the day, instead of arguing over all this crap, if a game is too hard for you then just turn it off and play something else. 

Neverwinter Nights is bad

Dungeons and Dragons is a game I have a fairly limited amount of experience with.  I first played it in 2010 with some people at the university I was at in Nagoya on my exchange year and then again in a basement gaming bar a few years later.  The experience was mostly a negative one, with the exception of the game bar basements early days but rolling dice around insufferable nerds was not an experience I would be willing to sign up for again in a hurry.  Maybe if a tight knit group of buddies got together like in my one decent group I’d be willing to make a character but otherwise no thanks.

But the problem here is not the game itself, it’s just the people.  The game itself is a deeply interestingly made thing that allows for insane freedom for both story teller (the DM) and the players.  This freedom has been regularly scuppered in my experience by aforementioned insufferable nerds but that’s not the games fault.  The solution, in theory, should be to remove the people from the equation and that solution is available to me in the form of video games based on Dungeons and Dragons.  We sacrifice some of the freedom of the tabletop in exchange for the ability to engage with the core mechanics without the need to be around people who don’t pay their water bills. 

So when I got a double game request on my stream for Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 I was sort of excited.  I had played a little bit of the first game in my younger days and thought it was cool and maybe these games will be the titles that get me to respect western made high fantasy RPGs. I was wrong.  What I got was overly long, buggy, badly written unfun bullshit where every cutscene put me to sleep and every encounter made me want to smash my keyboard

Of the two games, Neverwinter Nights 1 was the worst one by a wide margin.  Starting with an investigation into a plague and then expanding out into a larger conflict, the details of which I barely cared about as I was playing and I have mostly forgotten less than 6 months after seeing the credits roll.  The game suffers from 2 major issues that make it feel awful to play.  The first is the wild difficulty swings that can happen in the blink of an eye.  My Monk, 90% of the time, would have no issue punching his way through whatever monsters of the day were being presented in the current quest and then I’d wander into a room and there would be an enemy that would just one shot me.  The worst part of this is that because everything is based on invisible dice rolls, the solution to the combat was not to go level up or change strategies but instead to just save/load until the game gave me a win.  The roll playing game reduced to a slot machine.  

The second issue is the fact that you can only have one companion.  When I played table top, the groups had to be AT LEAST 3 so Neverwinter Nights only having the player character and a single AI partner is underwhelming to say the least.  On top of that you can’t customize the other party member AT ALL.  Gear is pre set, level ups are done automatically.  The whole thing of building a character and messing with the character sheet as you level up is completely removed.  What compounds this issue is that most of the partners you have access to are trash.  The guy I picked for the majority of the game seems to be the guy that most people pick.  Maybe if we could ROLE PLAY in the ROLE PLAYING GAME with our party we’d see some variance.  Even the old Baldurs Gate games, released way before this piece of shit let you kit your dudes out and interact with them in some actual meaningful ways.  Somehow things got worse as the tech got better

Speaking of, Neverwinter Nights 2, despite being a considerably better game in every way, addressing a lot of the gripes I had with the first one is still kind of a piece of shit.  In 2, the difficultly swings aren’t a huge issue and I have a party I can customize and interact with but holy shit the bugs really bog down the whole thing.  From the jump, the game barely worked AT ALL until I installed a community patch and even then it was still a little fucked.  The camera going crazy and characters rubber banding was highly annoying.  Cutscenes not playing properly often pulled me out of the experience and made certain events hard to follow.  The worst bug I got happened in the final dungeon where all my party members had a stroke and would not listen to commands.  The second worst being the story specific legendary sword de-spawning from my inventory upon entry to the final area that nearly caused a massive time loss.  A better game that’s just absolutely miserable to play

The other thing that sucked about the sequel is the ending.  Without hyperbole one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen in any game I’ve ever played.  A black screen with the text “You Win” written in 12 point Ariel would have been more acceptable.  The whole game revolves around a conflict with the King of Shadows.  You go on this big quest, uncover ancient secrets, forge a legendary sword, kill immortal skeletons by reading a school register at them and then when you finish all that and win the day, the dungeon collapses and you all die.  There’s a 10 minute cutscene of an intern reading Tolkien fan fiction at you but the core of it is “you win but you died also the end”.  I’m not saying that all stories have to have a happy ending but this was so trash out of nowhere that I had to google if I got a bad ending or not. I found out through that search that even fans of this horrible pile of filth think it sucks so at least we’re united on that front.

I never ever want to play Neverwinter Nights again.  I think I would have had more fun playing the table top game by myself as a one man party where I DM my own game.  If you played and enjoyed Baldurs Gate 3 and thought you might plumb the depths of older DnD based games, avoid these two sacks of garbage.  Just play BG 1+2 and call it a day because if you play Neverwinter you may never want to play a CRPG ever again

5 Games I Need to Play ASAP

 

Life has been pretty hectic for me recently. My wife just gave birth to our second child at time of writing and I’ve got a lot of other things going on which means my time to just sit and game is fairly limited. Thankfully, things should clear up at least a little bit in January so I’m going to take a moment to jot down 5 games that I have my eye on and I’m hoping to do a play through of soon
 

Hotel Barcelona

I have an aggressive case of Roguelike fatigue. Nothing makes me skip past a game faster than the seeing that tag in the game description. Not that I have anything against the genre itself, it’s just that there’s so fuckin many of them that I’ve just temporarily lost interest. But then Hotel Barcelona comes along and it’s a game from the collaborative mind of Suda51 and Swery. If you don’t know who these guys are then I suggest looking them up and giving their games a try. Killer7 from Suda I played at launch on my GameCube in 2005 and it has remained, to this day, one of my favourite games ever. Swery is the man responsible for legendary jank fest Deadly Premonition, a game so out there and interesting that despite it being mind bogglingly ass in some places I think everyone, gamer or not, should check it out at least once in their life. So a collaborative work from those two should be pretty good right? Well the names alone will get me to open my wallet so let’s hope I’m in for an enjoyable stay.

House of Necrosis

 

 

Oh god, another game with randomly generated dungeons and perma death, can’t move for games like this I swear to god. This game however asks the interesting question “what if Resident Evil was a Mystery Dungeon game?” and therefore piqued my interest instantly. I bought a Shiren The Wanderer game on my DS many years ago and ever since I’ve been a complete slut for the genre and one loosely based on Resi can’t be a bad idea

Cloverpit

 

Described as a cross between Balatro and Buckshot Roulette, Cloverpit is a game I initially disregarded when it appeared in my Steam discovery queue. My aforementioned Roguelike fatigue has caused me to be completely uninterested in Balatro and Buckshot Roulette was such a nothing game that I was sort of upset I spent money on it. But then I was looking around on YouTube and I saw someone say that Cloverpit was less of a Roguelike with slots and more of a puzzle game where you have to finesse the machine into giving you enough wins to escape the death game you’re in. That’s just fucking Kaiji! In case you aren’t aware, Kaiji is an anime where a dude in crippling debt plays games to either escape that debt or die. None of these games are played on the level and Kaiji has to often finesse his way around the gambles to clutch victory from the assholes that stacked the deck against him. That’s when Cloverpit started to appeal to me, turning a Kaiji-esque scenario into a whole ass game, fuckin great idea. Weather or not this is actually the case is another story but just the prospect of it being MAYBE true has got me wanting to try

Silent Hill F

If you’re in my discord or just know me personally then you’ll know I’ve been slinging a lot of shit at Silent Hill F so seeing it in this post might come as a surprise. All my potential issues with Silent Hill F stem entirely from the “Silent Hill” part of the title. For reasons that would take far too long for this post, the tenuous links to a franchise of a series that should have died in 2004 and hasn’t been good since I find to be upsetting. The original team were done with Silent Hill after the 3rd one, even more done after the 4th and moved on but the franchise has been beaten into a bloody pulp to milk more cash out of idiots who can’t engage with media that isn’t part of a larger IP they’re already comfortable with, a sad state of affairs to say the least. But when I saw the trailers to that game there was one thought that stood out in my mind and that was if it wasn’t for that branding, I’d probably be quite interested in it. If it wasn’t being pushed as a Silent Hill game to serve as more ruination of that original series’ masterful writing then I might have bought it day 1. Just call it “Hinako’s Flowery Trauma Fuckabout” and let it stand on its own and I would have rushed to open my wallet. Instead, you can take that £80 price tag and fuck RIGHT off. But with a discount and if I tell myself that I shouldn’t let bad branding ruin a potentially good experience, I have to admit that it does look kinda cool.

The Entire Sakura Wars Series

 

Throwing one retro entry in the post, a series I’ve wanted to have a go through for a long while is Sakura Wars. A strategy RPG franchise that began its life on the Sega Saturn, sort of pulling a neo-Persona type beat long before Persona 3 was even a flash of an idea in some guys head. It’s not a series I have 0 experience with, I picked up the first game on the cheap for my Saturn back when I used to collect retro games but I didn’t play it that long and certainly never finished it. I’ve also had New Sakura Wars sat in my collection of PS4 games for years now and have never once touched it so maybe it’s about time I get on that.  I adore SRPGs and I’m always down to play games with an abundance of anime waifus and therefore Sakura Wars seems like the kind of thing that’ll keep me entertained for a good long while.

Dirge of Cerberus Isn't THAT Bad

 

There’s a fairly lengthy unwritten list of games that most of the “gAmErS” tend to agree are bad.  When we’re talking about things like Atari ET, Superman 64, Bubsy 3D then I can stand with you and point and laugh at the abject failure of its design and presentation.  But then there’s stuff that people all say is awful but it reeks of idiots online just downloading their opinions from an ignorant YouTuber rather than actually having played the game themselves.  Things like Balan Wonderworld, Devil May Cry 2, Megaman X7 and Metal Gear Survive come to mind when I think of games that are fine but idiots who get their opinions from  content creators will blast them without having played them. 

Not that any of the above games are great in any way, but they are by no means worthy of the ire they get in comment sections and forum posts.  Also the criticisms these games do get are ALWAYS the same.  Always sweeping statements about X thing being bad or Y thing being cringe and never any specifics, which only serves to bolster my idea that you didn’t actually play the games in question.  Before I move on, let me just say that this is an absolutely pathetic mentality to have.  Johnny Dickhead with his game review channel full of awful opinions formulated from 2-10 hours of play of any given game telling you a game is bad is not an opinion worth heeding at all.  If I had, for example, listened to the opinion of foghorning dick head James Rolfe about Silver Surfer, I would have denied myself an honestly pretty good shmup experience.  Watching these people are fine but you should form your own opinions on things by engaging with the media and thinking about it for yourself.  Tell the content creators to piss off, most of them are only going with the grain for view counts anyway. 

But lamenting YouTube slop isn’t why we’re here.  Recently I replayed Dirge of Cerberus on the PS2, one of those games that has a pretty nasty reputation online for being completely awful.  Now I’m old enough to remember having played Dirge of Cerberus when it was new and before going in my memory of the game was that it was pretty OK.  Nothing mind blowing, not something I think about very often but also not shitty enough to stand out in my mind.  So is it really as bad as people say and I was just a dumb teen with bad taste OR are people on the internet just regurgitating the opinion of a big content creator that had a dislike for it? After my replay, I’m going to say it’s the latter

The chief complaint I see with this game is that it’s “clunky” and I’m sorry but if that’s how you feel about it you are just shit at the game.  I will concede that it is a little on the stiff side, Vincent lacks the fluidity of your modern action game hero.  But this is the kind of thing that you should get used to within the first 3 levels.  It’s stiff but it’s not like Vincent is a WW2 era tank and the enemies move like they came from DMC5.  Everything operates in this sort of weird tanky fashion and with a little practice it’s just not an issue.  If this is your big problem with Dirge then your opinions on not just this game, but probably any game in general aren't worth listening to, you clearly lack the motor functions to engage with the medium properly. 

The other big complaint I hear about is the plot and this one I’ll grant you.  The plot is fucking awful, the characters are corny and cutscenes, especially in the back half of the game drag on for WAY too long.  At first I didn’t mind it, it gave off that “I’m 15 and this is deep and heavy” vibe but as it went on and the stakes got higher and the conspiracies got more complicated it started to devolve into nonsense fan fiction.  I usually don’t mind levels of corny like this because I find it funny but Dirge insists on the severity of its own plot so hard that it’s exhausting to put up with.

A slightly more sporadic complaint I saw was regarding the difficulty being too much but I think the reverse is true, Dirge is pathetically easy.  I think I only died in one level where you’re in Midgar avoiding snipers.  2 snipers wombo-combo’d me from full to dead and after 1 restart and a little more attentiveness the section proved to be no problem.  Playing on hard, for the record.  The bosses are also stupidly easy with one late game boss failing to do any damage at all, which was quite funny.  I was playing with Retro Achievements turned on and the developer of the set thinks that killing bosses without the use of a Limit Break is a challenge worth awarding points for but none of the bosses actually need that kind of power.  Keep in mind too, that Limit Break is an item that fully heals you along with upping all your stats and you get to carry 3 of them NOT including the super markets worth of potions Vincent also has stuffed in his pockets ALSO NOT INCLUDING the auto reviving Phoenix Down, one of which can be active while another stored.  Dying in this game is ALMOST impossible.  Maybe you’ll find some challenge if you want S ranks in every mission but while even though I’m defending Dirge from the haters here, it’s not really good enough to warrant doing that shit.  People were also complaining about the back half of the game having too many bullet immune enemies but again, these people are just shit at the game.  Every room that has these guys usually has a few Ethers in them, and they aren’t immune to L1 materia shots.  They also aren’t immune to your wicked claw hand melee strike which stunlocks them until they die and if you REALLY can’t be arsed, just limit break.  Like I said, you don’t need it for bosses so just use it to kill the small fry.

The last common complaint I found is that the level design sucks which I both sort of agree and disagree with.  The levels are drab and a lot of time is spent clearing box rooms with dudes so you can get a key card but also the game tries, usually at least once per stage, to give you an interesting scenario to deal with.  Not a terrible criticism because long play sessions do get very boring but also not entirely true of the entire game. 

Finally I have a few little nitpicks to get off my chest.  Upon finishing stage you get to choose if you want to either level up or convert the points to Gil to buy upgrades.  I hate that this system is an all or nothing affair and the option to split my points like, half exp half Gil isn’t an option.  That said though, take exp every time because even doing that I had enough Gil for every healing item, ammo and a decent number of upgrades which were crap anyway.  Also the machine gun is useless.  Bad damage, bad range, putting mods on it didn’t help, always caused problems when I tried to use it.  Pistol and rifle for the whole game, put that gun in the bin.  Finally, the English voice work is FUCKING AWFUL.  I usually like Steve Blum, one of my few english anime VAs that I don’t want to see made homeless but his voice just does not fit a character like Vincent.  The rest of the cast are significantly more embarrassing.  How any of those people left the recording booth not wanting to commit Sudoku is beyond me.  I would never want to be seen near a mic again after performances like that.  The issue of the corny, nonsense plot being insufferable is exacerbated greatly by these Yank motherfuckers acting an FF7 plot like it’s Blues fucking Clues. 

So in conclusion, is Dirge of Cerberus a good game? No, not really, it’s a very 5, maybe 6/10 action game but you also have to consider that it was the first real spinoff for FF7 we got.  I know technically Before Crisis was first but that was a monthly subscription based Japanese exclusive flip phone game so fuck off with that.  Is it as bad as people on the internet make it out to be though? Absolutely not.  Over hated by people who either haven’t played it or sucked so bad at it that they never finished it.  If you’re interested in getting as much FF7 content in your life as humanly possible, then give it a chance.  More than likely you’ll have an acceptable time. 

 

The Type of Shmup I Hate

 

Shmups, or “shoot ‘em ups” are a genre of video game I have loved since I was a young boy. The earliest one I have any real memories of really diving deep on and getting good at is Thunder Force 4 on the Mega Drive, an intensely difficult title that ate up a staggering amount of my time with that system. I probably played one or two previous titles before that but my memory is hazy. However the one thing that is undeniable is that even to this day, despite the genre becoming as niche as it’s become, it’s a type of game that I have loved dearly the whole time.

Like most genre of game, shmups come with their own series of sub-genres. The big over arching ones being horizontal and vertical. This is self explanatory as it’s simply referring to the direction in which the screen does its scrolling. There’s also a 3rd type that I’m unsure what the internet at large likes to call which is an over the shoulder type game. You know, something like a Starfox. Not a fan of this style personally but I wouldn’t say I hate it. A game like Iridion 3D on the GBA might piss me off but you can give me a Lylat Wars or a Panzer Dragoon and I’ll have a grand old time.

Then there's the other big distinction of your regular vanilla shmup and bullet hell. The first kind being something like Darius or R-Type where the enemies shoot directly at you in easy patterns but some kind of other factor may make things more complicated. The second being something like Touhou or Mushihime-sama where the stage itself doesn’t really factor in at all but the enemies and bosses shoot at you in extremely dense patterns that require some of the prior types skills but mainly boils down to memorization and the ability to adapt to the odd curveball. I have no qualms with either type. I prefer bullet hell but I do love a bit of Raiden, Darius and Thunder Force too.

The type of shmup I absolutely can’t fucking stand doesn’t even really come down to a sub-genre really, at least not one acknowledged by online communities as such. The type of shmup I absolute cannot fucking handle is the type that I’m going to name “checkpoint shmups”. Let’s say, for example, you’re enjoying a bit of DoDonPachi in the arcade. You misjudge the space between some bullets or a stray shot escapes your focus and you eat shit and explode. A couple of power-ups fly out of your ship, it disintegrates and a new one flies up the screen for you to power on and keep fighting. When you eat shit too much, a full power appears, you pop in another coin and keep going. This is the kind of shmup I like, when I die the instant chance to re-power a little and the constant forward momentum feels good. But then there’s a game like Gradius and good lord does Gradius fucking piss me off. You’re flying around, having a good time and then a stray bullet blows you up or you run into a wall trying to avoid enemy fire. The ship explodes, the game stops dead in its tracks, the screen cuts to black and then knocks you back to a checkpoint in the level with no powerups. Sometimes it may give you one notch on the upgrade meter but most of the time it doesn’t. You lost a bunch of progress and now you’re weak as shit so even returning to that point feels like an impossible chore. MAYBE if you’re lucky and the checkpoint was by some enemies that drop upgrades, you can claw it back but upon that first death, your run is basically over unless you’re some kind of shmup demi-god.

THIS is the kind of shmup I can’t stand. Nothing kills my motivation to keep playing more than the game stopping me dead in my tracks to knock me back a few meters through the level. Gradius is a particularly bad example of this too because in that game, ship speed is tied to your power up meter and you need about 2 points in it for the game to feel even remotely playable. You die once, lose all your speed and weapon power and now segments that were at first easy suddenly become impassible without a great deal of practice and the only way to get that practice is to die and restart over and over. The very epitome of unfun dogshit in a genre of game where short, quick play sessions are one of the main draws. It’s mainly found in early entries in the genre and isn’t used as much today but that just means that going back to experience “the classics” is an exercise in frustration rather than fun nostalgia.

Shmups are great, even the ones that piss me off like Gradius I still enjoying playing up until the moment I suffer my first death. Bottom line though, in a genre like this, don’t kill the momentum because of a single mistake and if there’s any developer out there who has made a shmup like this within the last 10 years, sincerely, fuck you. Patch your game and take that shit out. Now excuse me I’m going to go play some Deathsmiles

I Think We’re Doing Remakes Wrong

 

I recently happened across a teaser for a remaster of legendary PC game Deus Ex.  A game so revered by gaming culture that there’s a joke that says every time you mention, someone will reinstall it.  The remaster, based on the teaser, basically looks to be the same as the original but with a bit of a face lift but it suffers from the problem of looking like complete and utter shit. 

Deus Ex was released in the year 2000 and it wasn’t the prettiest thing to ever hit our PC screens but being one of the first “immersive sims” it was an intensely interesting experience.  This new version looks less like a loving graphical rebuilding of that kinda fugly game and more like an amateur student project that you’d download for free off a modding site.  Some crap thrown together by a guy who’s been learning blender for about a year titled something like “Deus Ex HD Mod” or some shit.  Something you might download out of curiosity and then remove from your system after about 30 minutes into a new game. 

But does Deus Ex really need a remaster or a remake? Personally I don’t think so.  It was a great game when it dropped in 2000 and you can easily grab a copy, install it and still have a great time with it to this very day.  You could have just left it as is and everything would have been just fine.  Let’s face reality for a second here, though.  If you’re the kind of person who looks at something like Deus Ex (or any other deeply respected game for that matter; RE4, Crash, Dragon Quest etc etc) and then start posting online about how these things “need/deserve” remakes, then my bet is that you don’t actually like the game all that much in the first place. 

I caught whiffs of this the hardest when the RE4 remake came out.  Suddenly people in comment sections saying that they were so happy RE4R came out because the original version was “clunky”, “stiff” and even “unplayable in the modern day”.  If you GENUINELY believe any of this stuff about an old game then the reality of the matter is that you just don’t like RE4 that much.  That’s fine by itself but because RE4 is such a respected title and you’re too much of a quivering pussy to hold your own opinions on media, you start pining for remakes.  Even if your pines for modern releases are purely based in aesthetics then you’re still a bitch.  If you claim to be a fan of something or you see something that looks interesting and you’re put off even trying simply because it looks “old” then why are you even here? If you have that much open disrespect for gaming history like that, maybe you should fuck off to another hobby.

But this leads me to the title of this post, I can’t help but feel that we’re doing remakes wrong.  There’s no need to remake Deus Ex because we already know it’s good.  The only purpose this remake serves is so a sales team can utilize the power of nostalgia to make a line go up.  I think we should be using remakes and remaster to have a second go at games that were bad at the toke but that made of had value were they executed better.  One example I can think of for a game I played this year is The Bouncer on PS2.  A lackluster beat em up with extremely basic gameplay that demands that you spend about 60% of its 4 hour run time watching cutscenes.  Some levels in that game are single rooms with 3 dudes that you spam a single button to kill before the movies start playing again.  But the aesthetics were great, the world seemed interesting, if you remade The Bouncer in 2025 and fleshed out the combat, maybe made it a little Yakuza-esque you might have something special on your hands.  A more personal example for me would be a remake of the horror game Outlast.  Let someone who doesn’t have severe brain injury rewrite the plot and bring it more in line with the horror themed Mirrors Edge that I thought it was going to be instead of the painfully boring non-game it ended up being. 

Not that I’m ENTIRELY against remaking good stuff though.  I had no problems with the Crisis Core remake, for example because that was locked to the PSP, a system famous for having the battery swell and maybe explode.  Putting it on my PC was welcome.  SMT3: Nocturne was also OK in my book because original PS2 versions of Maniax were stupidly expensive and giving me a version that cost 30 bucks instead of 200 was nice.  If your remake serves as a middle finger to the retro game market then I salute you.  Finally I was completely OK with the remake of moon: Remix RPG Adventure because it never got a real English release until that came out.  I personally might be fine playing Japanese only games but when I find a good one I want to be able to suggest it without having to point to a shitty fan translation made by a guy that couldn’t order a beer in an izakaya without having a breakdown however the absolute state of that side of gaming is another post for another day

What I’m saying with all this is that we should be using remakes and remasters to have a second shake at stuff that didn’t quite make it in the execution.  Buying remakes so that you can pathetically wallow in nostalgia while giving money to suits who don’t care about the medium even a little bit needs to stop.  Next time you see a remake of a game you already know is good, just ignore it and instead go find something new and interesting and put your money there instead.  Doing a little digging will enrich your life much more than doing a 15th play though of Deus Ex but with shittier graphics this time

Edit: Please forgive the weird highlighting, the Blogger post editor is actually one of the worst things to ever exist, Ill try to ensure it doesnt happen again, maybe this post needs a fuckin remake

Choose Or Die? I choose die

 We all know that video game movies are generally pretty bad.  There may be the odd exception here and there but generally speaking a movie based on a game is almost guaranteed trash.  What's worse than video game movies, however, are movies about video games.  The most famous example of this is probably Ready Player One.  An unfathomably shit movie about a bunch of morons looking for some thing inside a VR Metaverse that will give them a bunch of money and allow them to escape their shit lives or something.  It's an extremely poorly written plot surrounded on all sides by trite video game references and a bunch of money men trying to seem relatable by pointing out that they looked up a thing about Adventure on Atari 2600 one time.  But then Choose or Die got made and it makes Ready Player One look like a fucking masterpiece.

There's a short story published by Steven King in 1983 called Word Processor of the Gods.  To cut a short story even shorter, some dude has a word processor that has the magical property of making whatever he types into it turn into reality.  The guy in the story basically deletes his shitty kid and shitty wife and makes a more well mannered kid his and a woman that's a bit nicer to him into his wife and then the word processor runs out of magic juice and breaks down forever.  I think that's what happens anyway, it's been a hot minute since I read it.

The reason I bring up Word Processor of the Gods is because Choose or Die basically rips off that idea wholesale but instead of it being a magic bit of 80s tech, it's an old video game that bends reality. The film follows some woman finds a game called "Curs>r" in her friends failing retro shop and on the back of the box there's a promise of a cash prize for anyone who can beat the game.  They call the number and find that it's still in service (with the audio recording being delivered Robert Englund of all fucking people) and so the woman takes the game home and tries to beat it to get the money and pull herself out of the shit, broke life she finds herself in.

"Curs>r" is a text adventure, kind of like Zork or any of those ancient purely text based adventures that you controlled by typing in shit like ">walk north" into a command prompt only this game creates its situations based on where the user is and then asks them to make some kind of horrible choice under the threat of death if they fail to choose in time.  For example when the woman first gets hold of it shes playing it in a bar and the game is like "you are in a tavern, should the waitress take a break?".  So she types yes and by "take a break" it meant that it forces the waitress to start picking up random glasses off the shelf and smashing them off the floor.  Then when asked if she should clean up by the game, the woman picks yes and Curs>r forces said waitress to pick up the shards of glass and eat them.  This is probably the only effective moment of the entire movie because I have to admit, watching a woman being forced to chew glass by a reality bending text adventure did make me wince.  

After that moment it's entirely downhill.  Instead of ramping up the stakes of the choices the game starts doing all sorts of weird shit like making the main character control a rat that's trying to eat her mother and somehow teleporting the characters to alternate fog dimensions to tease her about past traumas.  The core premise of the film isn't even that bad but the execution of the movie after the initial couple of scenes is just completely fumbled.

There's one really funny scene where the game traps a character in what I can only describe as "the lag dimension" and kills him by making him puke a never ending stream of casette film.  Base Film is soft and fairly brittle but somehow it kills him because this movie things that the inside of old casettes are made of barbed wire.  

The whole production feels like it was made by someone who has never actually engaged with anything outside of wikipedia synopsis. Like the writers know roughly what a video game is, have seen tech from the 80s in Instagram reels and maybe have a vague idea of the existance of horror movies and with this vague surface level understanding of these things attempted to make a film.  

Choose or Die is a boring movie trying to pander to middle aged men who will eat up any old bullshit if it has things from their childhood in it.  It's sad, embarassing and if you were going to make me choose between watching this film again or putting a bullet in my head, I will log out of my Netflix account and you can watch me die.