FMV Trailers Are Bullshit

I don't watch a lot of trailers anymore.  I can't think of a game with the exception of Persona 5 that I bothered to check out any of the pre release material for.  Even a game that I was excited for as Nier Automata I didn't bother to look at trailers for.

So while I was browsing Facebook a trailer for an upcoming game called Extinction appeared on my feed.  It was a FMV trailer of a man with a strange choice of wardrobe parkouring through a city killing monsters in a rather bloody and ruthless fashion.  Think God of War meets Prince of Persia but the main character looks like Connor McGreggor watched a few too many fantasy movies.  What really wound me up that the post and the comments were like "OH MY GOD THIS GAME LOOKS SO COOL!" 

It's fine to get excited, it was pretty bombastic but what people seem to forget about watching trailers like this is that they don't actually tell you anything about the game.  The trailer looks cool but information about the game is minimal.  Nothing about the game play, the most important part of any video GAME, is present.  Just a little bit of story and a cool action sequence with a big ogre thing being chopped into little bits.

If you took the time to go and look further into it you'd find that there is in fact some game play footage.  Now I'll give you that it's pre alpha so the developers have a lot of time to make it not awful but right now the game looks fucking awful.  The kind of thing you'd expect to find at the bottom of a cardboard barrel in a place like CEX along side stuff like Bullet Witch and Asura's Wrath.  To me the game play trailer looked a bit like that Attack on Titan game on PS4 just a lot less interesting and combat that's trying really hard to be intricate but really isn't.

I'm not gonna say the game is going to be shit or that trailers aren't worth watching.  Just keep in mind that when you do find a trailer and it's entirely an FMV with no information on the actual game, maybe you should take a minute to think about what you just watched before getting all excited.  Get excited for the game, not a glorified cutscene.

Fanbases Ruining Games For Me

You may think that title is a bit strange but it's something that happens to me quite often and it's a shame because usually the thing I end up hating ends up actually being quite good.  The problem is that my stubbornness to not be associate with the legions of twats kicks in and I end up nitpicking every little problem I can find with a given title or series and I convince myself it's shit.

This happened pretty hard with Final Fantasy 7, a game I got when I was quite young and loved the fuck out of it.  I'd play it for hours a day, multiple play throughs and even talk about it at length every day for weeks at school with my friends.  Then I got my hands on an internet connection and discovered a whole bunch of annoying twats that started to make me hate it.

It was a slow process.  First I found all the twats on forums and sites like GameFAQs or I'd see read some cringe worthy fanfiction and have to stay away from the computer for a few days to recover.  But I'd still play the game and enjoy it, their shittiness didn't affect the quality of the game after all.  But then I stopped playing it and eventually my memories of the game started to fade away and me being me the things I remembered most were the things that I had problems with.  Then large groups of twats would come along and brand it "THE GREATEST RPG EVER MADE!" or you'd play a game and there would be some 13 year old boy with XxSephiroth007xX as his username and eventually I'd end up hating it.

Then in 2010 I got over myself I replayed Final Fantasy 7 and.....loved the fuck out of it the same way I always did.  It's happened to lots of other things as well such as Kingdom Hearts and Halo with both communities being filled with the largest know-nothing sacks of shit to every curse a keyboard with their greasy hands and while neither of those games are bad there mere mention of it in conversation makes me roll my eyes and sparks thoughts of suicide.  Kingdom Hearts fans with their "2Deep4U" shit and Halo fans who will be OUTRAGED if you claim that Halo has always been a mediocre shooter that ruined the genre and the idea of sharing a common interest with these people makes me sick.

It even happens in other fucking mediums too

Attack on Titan, a big popular anime in Japan that seems to have garnered a pretty big western following I  think is a show that I've never watched but I fucking HATE IT.  It seems like an interesting premise but back when it was fairly new there were a large number of cockrockets on my Facebook feed posting shit like "LOOK AT HOW ADULT IT IS!" with a screenshot of someone being bitten in half.

Violence doesn't make an anime adult, you can't just look at a scene of someone being eaten and claim that's what sets it apart from anime who's target audience is school children.  I have a better argument, it's published by fucking Kodansha so OF COURSE it's not adult, it's just shonen trash.

That said, if I watched it I'd probably get a kick out of it because shonen trash does tend to be sort of entertaining in a mindless way where you can just admire the spectacle of some insane shit going down.  I can't ever bring myself to actually watch it though because alone I cant justify spending my time like that and with friends I'd just be nitpicking and pissing them all off.  So thanks Titan fans, you ruined that show for me forever.

I'm sure one day I'll get over it give it ago but until then there's a lot of things that are being ruined for me by twats.