I just want ONE AR zombie survival game

So a little while ago a friend of mine brought to my attention a game called mobile called The Walking Dead: Our World.  The game looked, at first glace, like a sort of Pokemon Go-esque thing where you go around killing zombies and it looked pretty cool.  However when I got home I found out that going around killing zombies with your phone camera seems to be the ONLY thing you do.  Granted I haven't played it yet and I'm such a sucker for TWD I'll at least give it a try but my disappointment is pretty high.

Ever since the success of Pokemon Go I've had this fantasy about an AR zombie survival game that would involve running around your local area to find supplies and fight for survival.  At the start of the game you'd register a location as your "base", it could be your home or place of work or wherever the hell you like.  You'd build up a base and gather survivors and every so often on the map little caches of supplies would pop up around the area your in.  You'd be tasked with going off and gathering supplies and keeping your camp alive but when you went out you'd be chased about by zombies (or whatever else) and if they caught you, you'd game over.  Maybe if you had a survivor in your camp it could act as an extra life or there could be some perma death system, I don't know, but I just want that kind of game to exist.

I got the same pangs of disappointment when I played Zombies Run, a sort of fitness app for mobile.  I thought it would be just that where I'd have to jog about collecting supplies but from the little I experienced of it, it's basically just a podcast you listen to while you go for a jog and the "fun" comes from the fact it asks you to run a bit faster every so often.  Not a bad app by any stretch but just not the zombie mobile survival game of my dreams.

So if you're a game developer and you stumble on this post, please go and make that above idea a reality.  I'm not a game dev so tweak it and make it actually good but at least give me a credit as "Blog Prick" or something like that.  I know zombies are an over saturated genre but I seriously feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in the world of zombie AR, someone needs to get on it.

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight Part 1

Identity Gaming 2019

Well holy shit it's already nearly the end of 2018.  It's been a bit of a shit year for the Identity Gaming blog and YouTube channel mainly due to a lot of personal shit happening involving me changing jobs twice but at least the Twitch stream is still going strong (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis, follow plz)

Anyway instead of dwelling on that negative nonsense let's just look forward to the coming year.  Here is some content that you can expect  to see throughout 2019.

More YouTube Stuff

The YouTube side of things has been a bit neglected so I'm going to put a bit more effort into that side of things.  I've actually had a Shovel Knight playthrough in the can for MONTHS but put off uploading it so I could do that stupid Lone Survivor playthrough in October.

Speaking of that, the 3 episodes of Lone Survivor have been deleted from the channel.  I wasn't happy with them and the glitched difficulty really fucked me off and made me not want to play it.  One day I'll do it again but for now I'm just fucking it off and focusing on other things. 

Still though, I have many a game that I can make a play through for that isn't a glitchy piece of shit AND there are plans for all sorts of fancy new series to upload.  I do want to expand on some of my previous, untouched things such as the thing where I talked about Japan exclusive arcade games or my series highlighting free shit for you to enjoy.  I'm also going to start a hall of fame/hall of shame so when people ask me questions like "Hey what's your favorite game" or "what do you think of X" I can just link them a video instead of having to tell people for the 95 billionth time that my favorite game is Panzer Dragoon Sa......I mean Bad Rats.

I'm also going to try my hand at some semi serious vlogging as I try to document my entire year in a weekly video that I'll upload every Sunday.  I'll talk about shit I'm playing, give site updates if there are any and if I come across and video game news that I feel is worth touching on I'll comment on that too.  I'm doing this 50% because I'm a self important little prick that craves that e-attention and 50% because when I think back to 2018 I can't seem to remember anything that I played other than Dragon Quest 11.  That either means that 2018 was a shit year for games (not true) or I'm just a forgetful idiot (more than likely true) so please join me through my 2019 journey. 

The Wheel of NES

I fucking love Wheel Decide, it's like my favorite website.  My other favorite thing ever is to set myself stupid challenges that I'll probably never finish but I like to think that maybe one day I won't be such a quitter so here I go doing something publicly so maybe the potential jeering and disrespect at my failure will make me not just give up as soon as I get bored.

So I've made a wheel on Wheel Decide of 100 NES games.  I'm going to play them all on stream (link above, don't forget to follow) and see how long it takes me to finish all of them.  I built the list by googling "best 100 NES games", using most of those and then taking some titles from the Angry Video Game Nerd playlist and throwing them in there so that maybe I can entertain some of you with my suffering.  Although Silver Surfer is in there and despite what that guy said about it, that game is awesome and if you think it's bad then you're just wrong. 

The Year Of Spookyness

So my favorite holiday season is Halloween.  I'm in love the the genre of horror as a whole and every year I plan all these great things to do for IG for Halloween and then I get busy or I go to Halloween parties and get drunk and subsequently hungover and none of this stuff ever happens.  So because I'm absolutely sick of that shit I'm just dedicating the entirety of 2019 to the horror genre. 

Expect to see a lot of horror related content in the coming 12 months be it about books, movies, games, whatever, if it's horror, I'm blogging about it.

Finally, despite all these cool plans for streams, videos, posts etc. don't forget that I'm still doing this all for charity so if you enjoy the content please throw a donation or two to the Alzheimer's Society charity.  It would be awesome if we could hit the current goal this year and maybe get a nice ways into the next one.  I'm planning to overhaul the incentives page so sit tight and some cool things might happen with that soon too.

Happy new year!

Legendary

I have no idea why I'm so disappointed with this game but after seeing it back in 2008, thinking it was a cool idea and then finally playing it 10 years later I just can't help but feel somewhat let down.

The game is about a guy called Deckard who gets hired to go and steal Pandoras Box.  As he tries to grab it the box brands him, he gets double crossed by his employer and he unleashes all manner of mythical beasts on the world.  You then have to team up with some British woman and a bunch of army type people to stop the big bad and put all the beasts back in the box.

This game came out at a time when shooters were dime a dozen and there was plenty of sort of, not really bad, but dull, bland shooters on the market.  Basically if you owned an Xbox 360 at any point you've probably played a game that's sort of similar in quality to Legendary.  Legendary though on paper seems like a really good idea because it was a modern shooter but the enemies weren't just dudes but mythical beasts.

When you actually play the game though it does have a decent number of mythical beasts to shoot in the face but there is also an abundance of dudes with guns.  That's only the start of the games problems though.  The controls for moving and shooting are fine but if you ever have to jump its the absolute worst thing I've ever seen.  Deckard for some reason can only jump about half a millimeter off the ground and while places where you actually HAVE to jump are few, when it does come up it's akin to trying to pull your own teeth out with your bare hands.  The absolute worst thing of all, especially for a game in this genre, is that the guns feel weak.  There's one part, for example, where you have to fight a Griffon and it's hard to tell if you're doing any damage because everything feels like a water pistol and the enemy doesn't give any indication that it's taking damage.  Even if your shooter is a bland, boring, by the books piece of shit it can be saved at least somewhat if it FEELS good to play.  F.E.A.R is a great example of a game that is quite shit but I still like playing it because mowing down guys in bullet time with that nail gun thing feels awesome.

It would be unfair to call Legendary a shit game, but it's definitely a forgettable one.  The kind of game that's only worth playing if you're absolutely MAD into FPS games and you've played literally EVERYTHING else.

Christmas Mini Marathon

Well it's December and once again I've been snowed under with things like a new job, social stuff and all sorts of other nonsense that stop me blogging as much I'd like.

However I'm going to have one day on the 28th where I'm going to have a little bit of time to do a long stream, so since it's just after Christmas day I'm planning  to do a bunch of Christmas themed games.  Right now I'm thinking such Christmas classics such as

Christmas Nights
Die Hard Arcade
Bible Adventures
Daze Before Christmas
and more!

So tune into the stream on the 28th and let's enjoy some post Christmas Day festivities!

Tau Plays Lone Survivor Part 3

The Walking Dead

Once again I've gone through a bit of a dry period with the blog.  Usually when this happens it's because I get incredibly busy and then by the time I have any free time I'm too exhausted/lazy to write stuff.  This time however, the reason is a lot less legitimate, I've just had all my post-work time gobbled up by The Walking Dead.  I was given a series 1-6 box set and it's basically consumed my life up to now.

It's a series I've ignored for a long time mainly because, and this is a bad habit of mine, the fan base being made up of a herd of wankers.  It's one of those shows that everyone was absolutely creaming their pants over to which I just rolled my eyes and was like "It's a fucking zombie show, it can't be THAT good...".  But, I have to throw my hands up on this one, I was wrong, it IS that good.  What's funny is that I feel like it's all going full circle because people have been saying that it's been slowly getting worse but I'm enjoying it more and more with every season I watch.

Story wise it's a pretty typical zombie affair.  There's an outbreak and then a group of survivors have to get together to help each other not die.  They look for a place to stay and then some other group will come along and fuck things up because of course the big twist is that the real enemies are not the zombies but other people. We've all seen it in things like Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days, Dead Rising and basically any zombie thing ever.  But what makes The Walking Dead so compelling is the drama between the characters and the characters themselves.  Despite the cast being so large the show does a good job about making you care about most of them and when one of them does get chomped on or takes a bullet to the head it is genuinely gut wrenching.  Also when the bad guys do get their just deserts it's always some kind of awesome sequence of events that fills you with that warm sense of satisfaction that a real asshole died that day.

Of course, I have some complaints about things the group does or the insane logics that certain characters decide to follow sometimes.  There's also mad inconstancy with general zombie strength and ability.  Like one moment the zombies will be clawing at a dude for minutes and said dude will take no damage and other moments a zombie will rip open some guys stomach like it's a fucking bag of potato chips.  Also it's a good job the characters are as good as they are because the premise for each couple of seasons is more formulaic than fucking One Piece.  My other final big complaint is that some fucking GENIUS decided to make a box set that ends at season 6.  Season 6 is the absolute DUMBEST place to end anything because the final episode ends with the entire squad getting caught, a new villain turning up, murdering a major character POV so we don't know who it is and then just cutting to credits.  Also Season 2 is dogshit, but there's plenty of videos on YouTube about that.

There's also a bunch of games based on this series that I'm now interested to try.  Well I say "games" but really there's only the Telltale (RIP) one that seems like it's worth a shit.  There's some other FPS one that I don't remember the name of that I remember everyone said was garbage and there's another called Overkills' The Walking Dead but that just looks like a really boring version of Left4Dead so I won't be buying that in a hurry.

If you've not seen it, go watch it, it's REALLY fucking good.  If the posts stop coming again it's because I caved and signed up for Netflix to see seasons 7+, so sorry in advance if that happens.  Also don't worry about spoilers, I had everything spoiled and it only seemed to make it more interesting, jump in!



 

Diablo Immortal: Just let it die quietly

So recently Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal and fans are PISSED.  In case you saw that banner and got excited because you didn't catch the story yet, don't get your hopes up too high because it's only a mobile game.  Here's a trailer

If you view it on YouTube instead of in the blog, HOO BOY that dislike bar.

Now I get it, oh boy do I understand your rage.  A series with such a long and respected pedigree being reduced to yet another cash grab, probably gatcha in some way, premium currency pay to win mobile dogshit.  The fact that it's not just some little extra thing that Blizzard developed on the side but a thing that was shoved in your face at fucking Blizzcon like it's something you should be excited for.  The condescending attitude when an audience member asked "will we get it on PC?" and the guy, when booed for saying no, replied with "What, don't you all have phones?!".  You have every right to be boiling mad but just stop and think for a second.

There are tons of generic shitty hack and slash games on mobile already.  I hate to admit it but I sunk quite a lot of time into a hack and slash RPG on mobile called HIT for a pretty significant amount of time about a year ago.  All that time ended up being wasted though since it's just another deleted free game on my app store account now.  At the very least, we know that Diablo Immortal will have a degree of polish to it, so if you're going to play a shitty mobile hack and slash game at least a Diablo flavored one might be worth keeping on your phone for the occasional fiddle with on a bus or while you're dropping a fat shit.

Plus it's not like Blizzard are dropping everything to focus on this one mobile game.  Diablo 3 just got a Switch release so if Immortal really disgusts you that much but you want portable Diablo anyway, just go play that.  You don't see Final Fantasy fans losing their shit over Record Keeper or Brave Exvius, you can at least be happy that Blizzard are still giving D3 the love it needs to keep going for another console generation at the very least.  If you hate the look of it that much, it really is as easy just not downloading it from the app store.

Booing, disliking videos on raging online won't really do anything.  If no one downloads it though, if that game is dead from day 1, THEN Blizzard will know they cocked up.  I get that your mad but calm down and let it die quietly instead of giving it publicity so that all the know-nothings and curious children with a tablet don't end up keeping the game alive for years to come.

I personally will never play it because it'll never stack up to Dragalia Lost.

The Playstation Classic Isn't THAT Bad

I never thought I'd do a post advocating in favor (sort of) of an overpriced emulator in a box but here I am.  Before I start, in case you don't know, Sony have followed Nintendo's lead of releasing mini classic systems with their own Playstation Classic.  The list of 20 games that are preloaded onto the system were announced and people are NOT happy about it.


There are some really well known titles in the lineup such as Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy 7 and Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey but then there's some slightly less popular/well known games such as Jumping Flash, Intelligence Qube and Mr Driller.  There's no real game on there that's really bad, despite some people telling me that Rainbow Six is dicks but I remember having fun with it (not played in a long time, mind you), so why are people so mad?

From what I can tell it seems to be that people are pissed because games like Puzzle Fighter 2 got put on the system over things like Spyro, Crash, Silent Hill or one of the other many great games in the PS1 library.  These are the 3 big titles I see popping up in every little comment but I don't understand how you can be mad about those because Crash has been remade for PS4, Spyro is about to be remade for PS4 and Silent Hill is owned by a company so inept that they nearly got sued over voice rights for their own remake of 2 and 3 so lord only knows what kind of licensing issue lies in that one.

My problem with people complaining about it in general though is that people only seem to want obvious shit on their classic systems.  For example, the SNES classic is a cool piece of kit but I'll never buy one because it only contains games that I've already played to death.  Obvious picks to keep the fanboys happy, so that people can go on social media and post stupid shit like "erh mah gerd do you remember Mario?!"  At least Sony had the balls to put on some lesser known titles like fucking Jumping Flash or Intelligence Qube, so that maybe once you've had your little nostalgia rush you can explore a few gems of the system that you may have not heard of.

I would have considered buying a SNES classic, for example, if Nintendo had made let's say, only 10 of the games safe bets like Earthbound, Metroid, Zelda, Mario and the rest as things like Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma and Ogre Battle.  Syphon Filter, Wild Arms and Super Puzzle Fighter are good games, why are you so afraid to broaden your horizons a bit?  The only "shit" game on that entire list is Revelations: Persona and that's only because the localization was a complete botch job, not that the game itself is shit.  Maybe its an updated version and then what I said about it being crap isn't even true. 

If you're THAT pissed off about it just go and emulate stuff.  The emulators for PS1 are actually pretty good so just make your own PS1 "Classic" and play the games you like.  Also the list of games in Japan is much different and contains things like Parasite Eve and G Darius.  The lineup here is so good I might even pick one up once the price tag goes down a little bit. 

Play something new, it won't kill you, you might even like that Wild Arms thing.

House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn Gameplay Footage

Sweet Language Based Vindication

Hell is about to freeze over.  The dead are about to rise from their graves.  The moons have aligned.  The Elder Gods are on their way.  Dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA!  There's an article on Polygon I actually think is really good!

https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/20/15356026/persona-5-translation-localization

Now granted it was written a year ago but I stay away from games "journalism"  so hard that it flew right under my radar.  Read it, now, it's really good.

Just for some context on my end, I played Persona 5 in Japanese roughly around the time of release here.  When the English version came out and I watched some of my friends play it I remember pointing out certain bits of the game didn't really match up with what was being said in the Japanese or that certain lines of dialogue were a little "off".  The nicer people that I know were willing to brush it off as just "oh well Localization!" and others responded by calling me a shitty weaboo piece of shit.

Turns out though I'm not the only one who felt this.  That Polygon article is just one of MANY if you Google it.  I think the one take I get from having a quick look around all the other articles (which I'll read in detail after posting this) say kind of the same thing.  It's not that it's outright bad (mostly) but it's amateurish and filled to the brim with stilted dialogue.

Take that line above for example.  It's a throw away comment in the middle of a fight that you might not really notice when you're playing it but if you take a moment to stop, slow down and think about it, it's a bit strange.  It's not "wrong" per se but it's a bit unnatural.  It's the kind of translation you might expect from an anime fansub group or a small group of passionate fans working on it to bring it to a nice western playerbase.  But Persona 5 isn't that, it's a full priced game (Costing 2000 yen more than your average new game here in Japan, by the way) that had a large team of translators and editors behind it and THIS is what we got. 

One thing that a majority of people still might disagree with me on, a topic I might go into in a later article is the voice work.  Not only was the localization bad but the performance was also atrocious.  I guess it's something we've come to expect with western anime voice actors but while in Persona 4 it was just a bit cheesy and campy in P5 it really ruined some things for me.  For example, in the English version of Persona 5, Ryuji doesn't sound like Ryuji in this game.  It sounds like a guy who played P4 and then tried to do a Kanji Mk2 rather than actually stay true to the personality of the character.  But Japanese voices were an option from the get go with P5 so I guess that's why no one gives a shit.

A good script and a good delivery of that script are important parts of story heavy games like this.  People shouldn't just settle for bullshit just because it's sort of expected of the genre.  ESPECIALLY from a company like ATLUS which we have seen do absolutely incredible jobs of localization with a lot of their other games.  Demand better quality for your hard earned money, goddamnit.

Earth Wars

Here's a game I'm still playing but it's taking me so long to finish it I felt like I'm just going to go ahead and talk about it now.  It's also not very good

Earth Wars, also known as Earths Dawn (I discovered literally just now as I tried to Google information about the developer) is a 2D side scrolling action game about people beating up aliens.  I lost interest in the game so quickly that I now just skip all the cutscenes but from what I can tell aliens came out of the Earth and now you have to retake what was destroyed as part of an elite squad that all decide to use swords instead of guns.  You have to battle your way across North America killing big bads and doing other random missions such as saving soldiers or finding items until the problem has been solved. 

The first thing you'll notice right off the bat is the art style and game play are extremely reminiscent of games such as Odin Sphere or Muramasa but sort of like the poor mans version of this style.  The visuals are sort of "chunky" and nothing animates very well.  Couple this with the fact that combat is very busy with explosions and particle effects flying everywhere and what you have is a very visually frustrating title.

But I didn't download this game for free of PSN just to look at it, dangit, I came to play!  Unfortunately the game plays like a pile of rotting assholes and is generally frustrating and just flat out not all that fun.  It's again, trying to imitate the fast melee type fighting that you find in games like Muramasa but it's clunky and quite often the character doesn't quite do the exact things you want them too.  Also there's no "impact" when attacks connect and you have no real feel for exactly how much damage you are doing.  Also there's no variation in attacks or combos, you just mash attack on the thing until it explodes into tiny pieces and then dash to the next guy to repeat the process.  I'm even at a point now where my weapon has a death effect on it so I just mash until I see the icon and then run away until it the death kicks in and I get to move on.

Speaking of a lack of variation the missions are absolutely abysmal.  You get the main story missions which have you fighting through a map to fight a big enemy which are kind of cool but these sections are always book ended by pointless "free missions".  The free missions have you running through the same drab environments again and again to do such exciting things like "Kill X of Y", "Find Z of this item" or "reach location with time limit".  Once you've done enough free missions to run down a timer you get to do another cool mission but these last about 5 or 6 minutes before it's back to the boring grind again.  The game seems to have an embarrassingly small amount of content but just has you do boring shit on the same 4 or 5 maps to pad things out and make you think that you got your moneys worth.

But the worst part is you MUST do these free missions because they get you skills which you have to activate on your, quote from the steam page, "Massive Skill tree".  The only thing massive about this skill tree is the size of the interface that you have to scroll through to get to each skill to activate them but the skills you get are all samey drab bullshit.  Most of the skills are stat increases or passive bonuses and the "active" skills that you get are all dumb shit like "Guard".  That's right folks, I'm 8 hours in and JUST got the skill that lets me block attacks.

Now I'm being very harsh but it's easy to see that Earth Wars had a lot of ambition behind it.  Clearly, the developer oneoreight has some good ideas but due to a lack of time/money/talent, whichever, the game just turned out a bit crap.  Of course, I'm not one to give up so I'll play it through to the end and if my opinion changes I'll be sure to make another post but I very much doubt it.  Even though I got it for £0 off PS+, I feel ripped off.  Don't spend £25 on Steam or whatever for it, just go and buy literally ANY game made by Vanillaware instead.

Tau Plays Lone Survivor Part 2

Dragalia Lost

So this is a game that came out last month for mobile devices that kept popping up on my Facebook feed after a few of my friends started playing.  The first thing I noticed is that it's an original mobile game that has a big fat Nintendo logo on it and along side that a big fat Cygames (Shadowverse, Grandblue Fantasy) logo.  After umming and arring about it for a while thanks to it's MASSIVE 2.5gb download size from the app store I decided to just give it a go.

Dragalia Lost has absolutely NO BUSINESS being this good of a game since it's just your typical mobile gatcha affair but for some reason I just can't get myself off the damn thing.  I have no idea what the story is since following a mobile story is like choosing to eat a bowl of shit but the game play is fun and the amount of stuff there is to do is just staggering.  The sheer amount of content is important considering the games recent release since usually newly released mobile games are a little thin on the ground at first and flesh out later but Dragalia is going all out right out of the gate.

The game itself is the same gatcha bullshit you see on the app store all the damn time.  Pull stuff, power up stuff, do dungeons to power up stuff even more rinse and repeat and grind grind grind ad nauseam.  There's two cool things about it though that set it apart from other games in the genre which is one, combat that's actually more interesting than just tapping until everything falls down and two, a level of polish that is rarely seen in the entirety of mobile gaming.  The combat has you using the touch screen to actually move characters and have them hack, slash and dodge through the environments.  When enemies attack the game will put these sort of markers on the floor, something I've seen done in other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 which means that paying attention to things like positioning is very important. 

There's a lot going on in Dragalia that would take far too much time to type out so instead I'll just recommend that you go download it and give it a whirl.  It's free so worst case scenario is that you'll just be unimpressed by yet another gatcha title and best case is that it drags you in and holds your attention as violently as it has mine.

Tau Plays Lone Survivor Part 1

Nihilumbra

So here's another one of those games I got for free as part of my PS+ subscription.  When I downloaded it and fired it up I had absolutely no idea what to expect but what I got was pleasantly surprising.  At time of writing I'm on the final world and I've not finished it but I was so elated to play this game that I had to talk about it early. 

Nihilumbra is a puzzle platformer developed by BeautiFun Games and was originally released for iOS back in 2012 but later ported to Windows, Vita, WiiU and Android.  The game follows the adventures of a little creature as he tries to run from an all consuming void.  The character itself is mute but bits of story are given to you by a narrator as you travel from screen to screen and I'm dropping that voice actor along side the guy from Bastion in my bag of "sexy narrators".  The game itself revolves around using colors to solve the various puzzles in each world.  For example the first color you get is blue which makes the surfaces slippy allowing for faster movement and increased jumping to scale large gaps.  As you get further and further you have to use all these colors together to defeat enemies and make it through the traps that stand in your way.  At the end of each stage you get a sequence where the void chases you.  In game play terms this is a auto scrolling section which tasks you with solving puzzles on a strict time limit.  These sections are probably my personal favorite parts of the game since they create a sort of intensity and pressure that I really enjoy.  It's also got a really nice soundtrack composed by Álvaro Lafuente which is worth going and looking up even if you haven't played the game.  It's ambient and I can see myself using the tracks from this game to accompany my study or writing.

My only real complaint about Nihilumbra is that it's WAY too easy.  I don't want to toot my own horn and say that I'm some kind of big brain Mensa bad ass (because I'm not) but none of the puzzles in Nihilumbra really taxed me.  The solutions all seem extremely obvious and when it does throw a difficult section at you the checkpoints are disgustingly nice and will never set you too far back.  There was an extra mode which I've not tried out yet so I'm hoping that there will be some more challenge there but the main story is VERY easy.  The game is also quite short which may be a put off for some but considering it's only £5 on Steam it's a reasonable length for the price.

If you're into your dark indie platformers and you're looking for something new then absolutely give Nihilumbra a try.  It's a short, sweet and satisfying experience and given you can get it for a series of portable systems it suits short commutes perfectly.  Pick it up and give it ago, jump into the void.  

Haunting Ground

Thanks to a donation from Twitch viewer VicePresidentFruitly I played through Haunting Ground on my stream.  Since I finished it last night I thought I'd take the chance to write a few words on what I thought about the game.

Haunting Ground is a game that came out in 2005 for the PS2 as a sort of spiritual successor to the Clock Tower games.  If you aren't familiar, Clock Tower is a series of games where you play as a young girl running away from a crazed killer and you have no means to defend yourself other than hiding inside or behind various things.  Obviously there's more to it than that but if you want to try and visualize it then imagine a sort of hybrid between Monkey Island and Amnesia.

In this game you play as a young woman called Fiona who gets in a car crash and winds up in some kind of castle.  After a short time she starts to get chased around by some kind of half human, half gorilla thing and to aide in her escape she joins forces with a dog called Hewie.  Together you must solve puzzles and run away from not only gorilla man but a whole host of colorful baddies who all want to do really bad things to you.

Gameplay wise, you walk around the castle solving puzzles until you run into whatever baddie is trying to kill you at which point you must drop everything you're doing to run for dear life.   You can call on Hewie to bite at the enemy to buy you some time but essentially you have to find a little hidey hole and wait there until they go away at which point you can resolve puzzle solving.  Keep doing this until you have a boss "fight" which is less of a fight and more of just a puzzle that you have to solve under high pressure of murder.

There are also some really annoying aspects to the game, chief of which is the panic system which is something that's been carried over from Clock Tower and then made 100x more irritating.  If Fiona gets punched up a bit or sees something a bit scary the screens colors will start to wash out and the controller will start rumbling.  Once you hit breaking point Fiona screams and promptly turns into a run away freight train with no breaks and taking damage in this state is likely to lead to a game over.  Since a lot of the corridors and areas in this game are so cluttered or narrow, if you're being chased and become panicked it's probably better to just put the controller down and wait for the end to come.  The other thing I dislike greatly about this game is Fiona's fussy kick.  If you press square you perform a little fussy kick.  The kick itself is fine and there are obvious things in the castle to fussy kick for items but there are some puzzles that require the fussy kick and it's so obtuse that it's easy to get stuck on something VERY easy for no reason.  For example there's one part where you need to kick a generator to get it working but the hint says "Looks like it needs a jolt" or something along those lines (I was playing in Japanese).  So I'm running around looking for cables or something to give it an electrical jolt but what it really wanted was for me to just fussy kick it three times.  The kick is so weak looking as well that you think there's no way it'll jolt a generator or break a pipe but that's exactly what it does.

Anyway, it's a pretty good game despite those gripes I had with it.  It's got some hilarious voice acting and the cast of villains alone is enough to keep a player going.  After beating one character I was genuinely excited to see what kind of weirdo was going to chase me next and the whole game has a sort of comedic vibe flowing through it that'll leave you giggling just as much as you are terrified.  It's not that easy to get hold of (I  think) but give it a go if you get the chance, it's pretty good. 

Silly Gaming Habits

The great thing about gaming is that if a small group of people play a game then they'll usually play it in slightly different ways.  Weather it's going stealth or guns blazing in Deus Ex, genocide or pacifist in a game like Undertale or even something as simple as party selection in an RPG, everyone experiences a game in a slightly different way.

That said, there's a couple of weird habits that I have when playing games that I think are shared between quite a large number of players no matter what your play style is.  So because I'm feeling a bit lazy today here's a numbered list of weird habits I have while gaming 

1) Item Hoarding 

This is a bad gaming habit that I feel A LOT of people have.  Probably the most prevalent when playing a survival horror game but present in all genres.  Let's say your playing Resident Evil and you find a sick grenade launcher and a handful of grenade rounds.  That's going to come in handy for when you fight a boss or come across one of those Hunters right? Fuck no! What if you need it for later?! That constant worry that if you blow through all your cool shit now you'll make the next part an almost impossible struggle.  

What this results in is you getting to the end of the game with stacks full of all the best shit and the credits roll with all the cool stuff rotting in a box or at the bottom of your pockets.  This is disgustingly true for almost every RPG I've played.  I end up killing the big bad guy and he goes down in a ball of flame while my inventory spills over with max heals and other useful crap that I never used "just in case".  Even know as I play Dark Souls 3 I have so much ember I could probably use 3 in all the remaining boss fights and still have some left over but there's something in the back of my mind that just won't let me use them.  

2) Rounded Item Numbers 

This one is extra stupid because it doesn't affect ANYTHING but if I don't do it I get a deep feeling of disgust for myself.  

Let's say you're playing an RPG and you come across a town.  You go to the shop and they are selling  potions.  You look into your inventory, you're carrying like 63 of the things and you haven't needed to pop one in a LONG time.  Well that doesn't matter because now you HAVE to buy two more to make that 65 or you ain't ever leaving this town.  In extreme cases even 65 is no good, and you'll either have to buy 7 more to make it 70 

I knew one guy with such an extreme case of this that when playing Final Fantasy 1 together I tried to leave a town with 19 potions in my inventory and he violently wrestled the controller off me to backtrack into town to buy 1 more because "it's just not right".  Never fuck with a man and his supply numbers 

3) Multiple Saving
I feel that this habit comes from the same part of the brain that's responsible for making you horde items.  You've finished a session in whatever you're playing and you go to save.  You hit save and you watch it until the "save complete" sign comes up.  Then you reach for the power button but you stop dead right before you push it....."did I just save?"  So you sit back down and do it again and this process can repeat a number of times before you're fully convinced that your progress has been properly recorded.

This creates an extra layer of mental torture when you play a game that doesn't have traditional saving and just auto saves everywhere.  You see the little icon for the save and you turn off the system but you just can't trust it.  You spend the whole day wondering if it really did save and it eats at your sanity until you get home only to realise that everything was totally fine.  I've had situations where I've turned off a game like that, only to return to the console about 5 minutes later and powered it back on again JUST to make sure.

4) 100%ism
Now if you're the kind of person who buys only one game, completes it fully and then trades it in then congratulations you're some kind of mutant that needs to be captured and tested upon by the government and also this point doesn't apply to you.

Many however suffer from the dreaded backlog.  Games sitting on a shelf or in an online library just waiting to be played but you can't yet because you've not finished the X amount of other games that came before it.  A backlog is made worse if you're the kind of person who's obsessed with seeing a little 100% marker or getting the platinum achievement or whatever for whatever game you buy.

Personally, my backlog is so huge that I can't bring myself to even consider buying certain games because I know that if I start playing it my backlog will never progress or, even worse, I'll never get around to playing it.  Breath of the Wild is a great example of this since I really want to own my own copy of it but I know that I'll chase that 100% so obsessively that the hundreds of games in my steam library alone will continue to sit, unplayed, for god knows how long.

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These are the ones that plague my life but if you have any other weird ticks or habits when it comes to your gaming let me know in a comment! 

Spider Man, Puddles and Controversey

The new Spider Man game dropped recently and while I've not played it yet it does at least look pretty good.  I'm not one for comic book heroes personally but it does look like a generally pretty fun action game.  Something I'll absolutely grab once the price drops a bit. However I'm not here to talk about the game itself, but about some recent controversy that surrounds it regarding puddles.

The story goes that there's a room in the game that was shown during a trailer at E3 looking a certain way but when the game came out the room looked a bit different.  Now I'm not going to say flat out that the release version looks like shit but it does look worse.  It's hard to make a game look like shit in 2018 but there clearly is more polish on the trailer version than there is in the version players paid money for.

So this prompts a bunch of people on twitter to start asking questions to the developer, Insomniac, about what the hell happened.  Insomniac responded by shrugging their shoulders saying "we didn't do anything" which upset a number of people and then glorious internet drama happened.  Of course, when there's drama news websites flock to it to write about it (kind of like I'm doing lol) and put in their two cents.  To my surprise and horror (not really) there's a great deal of outlets calling the issue stupid and using the whole thing to take a jab at anyone who has THE NERVE to criticize the game.  For example one idiot on Forbes writes his article like gamers are nothing but a pack of hungry wolves just waiting to rip any game dev apart if they do meet their high standards.

It seems like that idiot along with every other idiot who wrote articles like that are missing the point entirely as to why people are upset.  Let's make one thing very clear straight away, the puddle isn't the reason why people are upset, it's the fact that we were lied to by promotional material, AGAIN.  If all the trailers for Spider Man were cutscenes no one would say shit but that was GAMEPLAY so I don't think it's so unreasonable to ask that the gameplay looks the same as your damn trailer.  It's also not the first time it's happened either, just off the top of my head Dark Souls 2 and Silent Hill Downpour are guilty of the same thing and it was JUST as bullshit with those games as it is with this one.  Imagine that you went to a restaurant and there was a picture of a juicy, medium rare, perfectly seasoned absolutely delicious looking steak on a menu, so you order it.  When it arrives at your table though it's well done and just not quite as appealing as it was in the picture.  So you eat it anyway because you love steak and yeah, it's still good, but it's not what you paid money for.  Do you see where I'm coming from here?

The worst part about this whole thing is that if you look up the game on metacritic, despite the controversy it still has an 87 rating.  People are still enjoying the game despite their gripe with the graphics so all these outlets are shitting on gamers for what? Being upset about promotional material lying to us about what the game looks like?  It's understandable that things change over the course of development but don't wave the game in our faces going "LOOK AT HOW GREAT THIS LOOKS" and then make it not look like that.  For some, they are paying money BECAUSE they said it looked that good. 

Sure, it doesn't ruin the game and sure, it's not really THAT much of a big deal.  For me though, seeing the response of the gaming press further cements the idea that gaming media is nothing but a massive collection of gaming shitrags not worth giving the time of day to.

Ready Player One

This is part of the series of posts I'm calling "Films wot I watched on the plane" and it's not going to be very long because I can sum up my feelings on Ready Player One in two words.

Complete abomination

Now if you didn't close your browser right there allow me to elaborate. Spoiler free

Ready Player One follows the adventures of some kid in a slum called Wade Watts.  Set in the future, Wade along with millions of other people spend most of their days in a sort of weird super-future version of Second Life called The Oasis.  With this being a family movie the plot can't be "if you die in the game you die for real" so all dying in the Oasis means is that you reset back to level 1 and you lose all your shit.  The plot actually revolves around the guy who created the Oasis dying and leaving behind a sort of gamer will where he has hidden 3 keys around the game world and any player who finds them basically becomes the owner of his company and therefore, owns the Oasis.  This of course attracts the attention of a big evil company called IOI and if they find the keys that would be like EA becoming the one and only game developer and publisher in the real word.  So Wade enters the game with his avatar Parzival and teams up with a bunch of other misfits for a wacky adventure in the virtual world.

Now despite the fact I think this movie is a complete abomination I will have to concede that if you don't play video games and know nearly nothing about them, you'll probably quite like it.  It's competently made, the acting is fine (I guess) and it's full of special effects and bombastic sequences that if you're just looking for a stupid popcorn flick then you'll probably garner at least a little enjoyment from it.

The problem arises when you're a viewer who quite enjoys games, which is kind of ironic because you'd think that would be the movies main audience.  While the movie isn't terrible (it's definitely stupid though) it's just sort of insulting.  Not because it takes liberties with how VR works or the way games are sort of in general but because of all the fucking references.  It's a bit like your dirty uncle coming to a party and then trying to show off to all the young people because he used to play Atari and has seen pictures of characters from Overwatch.  The game shoves all these referential bullshit on screen and EXPECTS you to jump up and down like an excited child, point and be like "OH MY GOD THERE IT IS!" but all it makes me do is roll my eyes so hard that you could power a small country with the kinetic energy.  Yeah I get it guys, you know what FPS games are and you've seen that one episode of AVGN where he talks about the Atari game Swordquest.

That's about as much as I can say without spoilers so I'll end with this.  If you don't enjoy video games (and therefore probably aren't reading this post) you might like it.  If you DO enjoy video games then just stay away and instead of wasting your time with this go play an actual game for 140 minutes instead.  

Difficulty Nostalgia

I think everyone gets that nostalgic feeling some time.  When a memory of a game pops into your head and you get this uncontrollable urge to play it again.  When most people talk about their nostalgic experiences with a game they usually talk about a games quality, the game being either just as good or at lot worse than they remember it being.  One thing I noticed that people don't mention too much when talking about their trips into the past is difficulty.

The things I hear the most when people talk about older games the phrases I usually here are "yeah it still holds up today" or "man, that has NOT aged well".  I however had a strange case the other week when I decided to play the Vita remake of Muramasa: The Demon Blade, a game that came out on the Wii in 2009.  As I slashed my way across ye olde Japan the game played EXACTLY how I remembered it, ar least in terms of gameplay and fun factor but I found it to be WAY harder than I remembered.

I seem to remember the game being pretty easy back in 2009.  It was fast paced 2D hack and slash heaven and I don't remember getting a death until near the end of the game but in my current playthrough the second boss is pushing my shit in really hard.  I don't want to believe that I've gotten shit at games in my old age but it's either that or my memory of how well I did is WAY off.

This also occasionally happens in reverse where the game is way easier.  For me it was when I was learning how to speedrun Silent Hill 2 and I was dreading the maze near the end because in my mind it was complex and full of shit trying to kill you.  When it came to it though I blazed through it and none of the enemies came even close to touching me.

It's always fun to go back and play old games and it can suck when it doesn't live up to your expectations.  Although in my mind it kind of sucks a bit more when you go back to a game you thought you were good at only to find that you suck.

Severed

So when I was on the plane to the USA for my summer holiday I decided to pick one of the random Vita games I got for free as part of PS+ and the first choice my finger went to was a game called Severed.  I didn't have any expectation for this game but what I got was actually really good. 

The first thing I noticed right off the bat was the art style.  I thought I'd seen it before somewhere and it wasn't until I got off the plane, hit Wi-Fi and was able to Google it that I discovered that Severed is made by a developer called Drinkbox Studios who also made another great game called Guacamelee! Just as an aside, if you haven't played that you should also go check it out because it's fantastic.

So the game starts out and you find yourself in the role of a young girl who's family has been taken away by monsters and your arm has been cut off.  You walk through her destroyed house and an evil thing in a mirror gives you a sword and then you go on an adventure to get them back.  The story is a bit bare bones but it's got everything you need to make you want to press on.  A missing family and a world full of weird monsters and places to kill and explore.

Game play wise the game plays sort of like Zelda had a baby with one of those weird first person horror dungeon crawlers on the Amiga or something.  You have to explore dungeons and each dungeon gives you a piece of gear that will not only solve the puzzles in that dungeon but open up extra bits of the world for you to go and find secrets and whatnot.  There are three "worlds" let say with one hub area that connects them and as you gain gear and skills you'll want to back track for heart pieces (for more health of course) and brain pieces (for mana)

It's the combat however where this game really shines.  You use the touch screen to swipe enemies with your sword and each enemy has different patterns that you have to work out in order to deal damage and to block their oncoming attacks.  At first you just work out how to kill them and then kill them but as you progress through the game it starts throwing multiple enemies at you which surround you.  This puts you in situations where your having to manage not only attacks and blocks but doling out the occasional smack to the enemy behind you or to your side so that their attack meter doesn't fill up and slaps a bunch of your life away.  If you deal out enough hits without being attacked or blocked you fill up a bonus meter and when the meter is full it allows you to....SEVER!....enemy body parts which you collect and use to power up your characters skills.

I have two complaints about this game, the first being that it felt a bit short.  I don't know if it's ACTUALLY short but I managed to finish it after spending only a couple hours on the plane and then a couple more on a bus tour ride but it could just be that I'm really good.  Also the upgrade system is broken and you can basically get all the upgrades you need even if you suck at the game.  Sometimes in pots and things you find "giblets" and one of the first skills you learn is how to transmute giblets into upgrade items.  Even if you somehow manage to go the entire game not being able to sever a single body part (impossible) you could still power up enough for the final boss to be a complete cakewalk.

Still, despite these complaints I had a great time with Severed, it's a fun game with a lot of personality.  I played the Vita version but apparently it's on mobile, Wii U and Switch so go check it out.

Streets of Rage 4

Well it's been more than 20 years since we last had a Streets of Rage game and since then the side scrolling beat em' up has been very much a niche genre since those days but that didn't stop this trailer from sweeping in and making every old school gamer squeal like a school girl.

At time of writing there isn't much information on it.  Hell, we don't even know what platforms it's going to be on yet.  It's like this video came out to tell us nothing other than it exists but to be honest that's more than enough for me.

I do have one little problem with it which is the art style and it's not that it's bad I'm just not really digging it.  But me slightly disliking the art style of the trailer and the game isn't enough to turn me off, it still looks like not only an honest to goodness old school side scrolling beat-em-up but also a really good sequel to a classic series.

As of right now it looks like a lot of love is going into this project and let's hope that further developments will keep it that way.

Rampage (Movie)

Of all the games that you could make a movie of, why in the name of FUCK would you make a movie out of Rampage?!  I mean look at it.

It was a fairly simple arcade game released in 1986 where you controlled one of three large creatures as you punched buildings until they fell down for points.  How the fuck do you make a movie out of THAT?

Well they did it by hiring The Rock and having him be best friends with a CG gorilla that he communicates with via sign language because they were ripping off Jurassic World.  The movie starts with Evil Corp having an experiment they were conducting in space go wrong and the containers of evil juice they were working on drop to earth.  A wolf, crocodile and of course, The Rocks gorilla get a face full of the evil juice and turn into giant...RAMPAGING....monsters (eh! EH!?!).  The monsters get mind controlled by evil corp to come into town and start smashing it up but because the rock is best buddies with the gorilla he talks him down and together they kill the wolf and the crocodile and save the day (oh yeah, spoilers).

It's not so much that the movie is bad, because when the source material you're working with is so basic it's hard to fuck it up, but it's just PAINFULLY pointless.  Almost every big action movie released in the last 10 years, action movies better than this, have bits in it where buildings get smashed.  Only difference between those movies and this is the incredibly stupid relationship between The Rock and his gorilla so if you're life long dream was to see The Rock get flipped off by a CG ape then this movie was clearly made for you.


It's not bad enough to laugh at or be angered by like House of the Dead or Bloodrain but it's also not good enough to warrant a real watch either.  If you REALLY want to see it then wait until you can find it in a Tesco's bargain bin for £1 but until then just play the game instead.

Gaming on a Plane

 

If you've ever been on a plane for a long flight before you'll be familiar with the in flight entertainment system.  Most people use these things to watch movies on but if you actually take a moment to go through the menus you might have seen that a lot of them have a selection of games on there.  This sounds cool but unfortunately gaming on in flight entertainment is one of the most frustrating things in the universe.  

Straight off the bat there's the problem with selection.  Most of the games on offer are crappy little flash games or things like parlor games but this is sort of minor because you'd have to be a bit stupid to expect the latest version of Dissidia or Wonderland Wars.  The real problem is that despite these games being so simple and undemanding the systems can BARELY handle them.  For example I killed a few moments by trying to play Bejeweled at one point and the screen was so unresponsive that I had to push a gem about 5 times before it would select. The passenger next to me tried to play a bowling game that involved a flick on the touch screen and she attempted this gesture for a good five minutes before the game shot her ball off into the gutter at 5fps.  

There was one flight I took that actually had Street Fighter 2 on it that was controlled with the little handset mounted under the screen.  This sounds cool but it ran SO POORLY that even moving your character a step to the left side or right was an exercise in pure misery.  Even the Commadore 64 version of SF2 2 ran better. 

Now most people have the good sense to bring a portable system with them.  I had my Vita for my last trip and tried these games for curiosity's sake but I'm sure there's some people who, on a 10+ hour flight who have desperately wished that they could play a game of Zuma instead of sitting through another AAA Hollywood blockbuster.  

But the real reason I'm making this post isn't JUST to shit on bad quality plane games.  I really wanted an excuse to talk about the Sega Mega Jet! 

This was a handheld device that worked with the seat monitor on JAL flights.  It allowed passengers to bring their own carts onto the plane and play to their hearts content.  Obviously you can't use them anymore but a long haul flight would be a hell of a lot less boring if I could rock some Dynamite Headdy.  My biggest question is why don't we have this today?! I know we have a lot more options for portable gaming nowadays but taking my hardware outside of Japan always makes me horribly paranoid since using a system in public in England and maybe America makes you a target for heavy judgements at least and a mugging at most. Wouldn't it be cool though if let's say Valve released a thing where you could put a couple games on a USB and then play them on the screen in the plane.  Even if it ran like shit some in flight Slay the Spire would help kill the boredom. 

Still no one expects plane games to be good and this is such a non issue I don't really know what the fuck I'm on about

New Megaman 4 PB (44:53) [Twitch Link]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/295441429

I don't know how to embed video lol

Why Silent Hill 2 Is So Damn Good

If you've not at least heard of Silent Hill 2 at this point in time you're either VERY new to gaming or have been living under a nuclear blast proofed rock for many many years.  When people say the words "horror game", at lot of people instantly bring to mind either Resident Evil or Silent Hill and if it's the latter they usually are thinking about the second one.  While my personal favorite Silent Hill is 3 because I really like the occult story line in that game, there's absolutely no denying the impact of SH2 on not just it's own series but the horror genre in general.

The reason that I feel it's so effective at what it does is that no matter what age you are, there is a level of horror to be found in Silent Hill 2 that will freak you out.  I remember when I first played it, I don't remember my exact age but it was around high school time I think.  My parents, every evening after work, would unwind and relax before making dinner and doing housework by chilling on the couch with a glass of wine and a bowl of nuts.  Meanwhile, I'd be on the PC or something gaming away or just generally wasting time.  Most of the time they would be watching TV but there was one occasion where the TV was vacant so I decided to jump on and the game I set on that evening was Silent Hill 2.  It was daylight outside, my family behind me and yet just the opening section of that game freaked me the fuck out.  It didn't need a dark, isolated room and a pair of headphones, it managed to scare me regardless of all that.  The spooky atmosphere and the creepy monsters managed to freak me out in a way that a lot of games didn't back then and even don't now.

Now when I was younger, scary monsters and things like slasher movies had quite an effect on me.  I was a bit easy to scare back then but as I got older that stopped happening.  The idea of a zombie apocalypse stopped being a terrible prospect, monsters jumping out of my closet became a laughable idea and ghosts flopping from my TV lost it's charm.  Admittedly, I'm very hard to please when it comes to horror.  I can enjoy a horror game or horror movie but it's a VERY rare occasion when I'll actually be scared.

But then I replayed Silent Hill 2 in my adult years and was JUST as freaked out now as I was back then.  What makes Silent Hill 2 isn't the fact that it managed to keep scaring me despite the fact I'd seen it before AND it pierced my adult cynicism but the fact it scared me for an entirely different reason.  Silent Hill 2 is about the main characters wife getting sick and dying, the plot twist (spoilers) being that he killed his wife because she was going to die anyway but mainly because he couldn't handle it anymore.  When I was younger this was just a "wow, how horrible" moment and then I went back to being scared of tables with tumors on them but playing it now it was THIS part that shook me to my very core.

I grew up and got married and one of the things that worries me to no end is the idea that one day I'll lose my wife.  When you play Silent Hill 2 and you see what James went through in that game your brain starts asking you questions that you don't have the answer for.  "What would you do if YOUR wife became terminally ill?", "would YOU be able to handle it?" and worst of all "is there a chance YOU might do what he did?!".  Of course you'd hope that you'd assume you'd be a good person and care for the one you love but Silent Hill shows you that very real, very human weakness that maybe you just aren't as strong as you think you are.

It's multi-faceted horror like this that makes Silent Hill as good as it is.  Doesn't matter if you're a teen scared of monsters or an adult scared of loss or even a lack of knowledge about yourself.  It's something I've not seen in a game EVER since Silent Hill 2.  I've seen games try, but never do it this masterfully. 

If you've never played it you ABSOLUTELY must.  Go do it right now

Creatively Bankrupt at Capcom

Capcom used to be one of the biggest and best companies out there.  Street Fighter, Megaman, Dead Rising, Monster Hunter, Devil May Cry, the list goes on forever of great franchises under their belt.  While some of their stuff has gone a bit stale like Megaman, recent releases like Resident Evil 7 show the company clearly still has it somewhere.

Recently they released news that they were remaking Resident Evil 2.  This remake not just being like the RE1 remake on the Gamecube back in those days, but a full on remastering where it's all new fangled over the shoulder stuff now and basically nothing like Resident Evil 2 at all.  Sarcasm aside it doesn't look too bad, even if it's not the remake I wanted or hoped for, it'll probably still be, at the very least, a good game.  However the hype surrounding the remake has set off some money alarms at Capcom headquarters and they have realized that remaking old games=BIG BUCKS.  They have said they are going to "explore" the idea of remaking more of their older games.

This may be exciting for some people that we may be getting nice shiny new versions of Dino Crisis or whatever but to me this news screams that they now have an excuse to be lazy.  Now that they know that remaking old games will generate hype AND dollars, why bother trying to make anything new?  If you google "upcoming Capcom games" the three titles that appear at the top of the search are Devil May Cry 5, Megaman 11 and Deep Down.  So two sequels and Souls-looking dungeon crawl.  Google that in six months and it'll probably just be a list of remakes and a tweak to Street Fighter.

Maybe I'm just mad and cynical because I'm sick of seeing remakes and sequels EVERYWHERE.  Of course, gaming isn't devoid of it's original IPs, there's plenty of indie devs and other companies putting out original stuff but I just feel that it's a shame that a big lad like Capcom isn't using the piles of money it has to try something different.  Let's at least hope that if they do start churning out remakes, they are at least of good quality.

Ajin

I've been sort of off anime for a long LONG time.  I watched a hell of a lot of shows back in my high school and early university days.  I dropped off not only because I just didn't have time but because I just couldn't seem to find anything decent that wasn't full of squeaky anime girls.  Not that I'm anti squeaky anime girl, Dungeon Travelers 2 on the Vita was pretty much ONLY that, but when it's the only thing available I lose interest.

I don't know what came over me but I suddenly decided to look for something to watch and the first genre I turned to was horror.  I started by reading the manga for Parasyte which was enjoyable and from there started looking into a show called Kakegururi which was about squeaky anime girls gambling so I was getting off track. To get myself back on track I looked up a show called Ajin and found myself getting hooked pretty fast.

The show is about a high school boy (because it always fucking is) who gets run over by a truck and is outed as a much feared Ajin.  Ah Ajin is basically a fancy anime way of saying "immortal" but in the case of this show it's not that you can't die, but when you do die you just get back up again.  This leads to some pretty cool action sequences but also some really grotesque horror stuff.  There's one point early on where the protagonist is captured and tortured for "science" and it's not what's happening to him that's disturbing as much as the idea that you have to suffer that over and over again.  There's also stuff with fighting ghosts but I feel they're there for more anime fight purpose and the real enjoyment comes with watching how each Ajin in the story deals with their outcast status.

I've not really been hooked on a show like this since early 24 or The Wire.  I'm not one for binge watching shows but each episode ends with some insane bullshit that just makes you want to see what happens next and I can't resist that "next episode" button.  If you're looking for a show that isn't just weeby cutesy crap that check out Ajin.  There's a second season I've not watched yet but I'm sure it's awesome, go check it out!

Game Dev Is Hard

I think anyone who is seriously into video game has had a dream or at least a thought of wanting to make their own game at some point.  With the rise of indie developers making huge numbers of sales on platforms like Steam, why wouldn't you want a piece of that pie, right?  However game development is INCREDIBLY hard.

I've been trying, for a while, just to make my own piece of shit game in RPG Maker.  Now maybe it's a problem with the genre I'm trying to develop for but before you even start doing anything on a computer there's so much that you have to think about.  I feel that if you don't go in with a decent plan then the project is going to, maybe not fall apart, but get pretty confusing pretty quickly.  You have to have all your ideas and how they are going to work together straight before you really begin.

Now you would think that the actual putting together of the game, the coding, would be the hardest part of the process.  While coding is an extremely hard thing to do we now live in an age where there are a number of programs to help you along with this process. For example, I'm making something in RPG Maker and I know next to nothing about coding.  Despite that, I've been able to use the tools provided to at least get SOMETHING working.  A little man walking around an island that gets into random battles doesn't sound like much but when you're starting from the bottom it's a pretty big deal.  I have another friend who is trying to make a point and click adventure game in an engine called AGS and as far as I know he taught himself all the coding side of that by just fucking around with the program and asking on forums for help.  Of course, you're quite limited when you use these kind of tools but when you're just starting out they are a good way to put your big toe into the ocean of game dev, so to speak.

But no, the reason why game development is so hard is just the sheer range of skills you need to be able to pull it off.  There's a reason that very few games are developed just by one guy.  You need to be able to do the coding, compose music, write stories if your game needs it, make artwork and have a good game play idea to make all that shit stick together.  That's A LOT to ask of a single person.  I feel like I have good ideas and if I'm making an RPG or adventure game I'd be pretty good at writing a story but I know NOTHING about composing music and I can't draw for shit.  This is a big roadblock for your average person.

However there are great examples of absolute beasts making great games entirely by themselves.  The one that springs to my mind straight away is Touhou, made by one drunk man who goes by the name of ZUN.

Awesome games, great soundtracks, incredibly challenging and fun to play and yet that artwork is....shall we say mediocre at best.  No one can be perfect though, the amount of skill the guy has in all of those fields surpasses mine by a great deal, I'm truly in awe over how these games even exist.

Still, if you do have an idea for a game and you are slowly working away at it, don't let it die.  If you can't draw, go learn.  If you don't know shit about music? go google some tutorials.  We live in an age where all this information is readily available and if you're willing to put in the hours then anyone could probably pull it off.  Just don't get frustrated when it isn't the walk in the park you were probably hoping it was.