The 2021 Tau Awards

 

At time of writing it has just gone midnight and it has become 2022.  To celebrate the new year lets look at the games I played over the last year and give a bunch of fakey award titles to them.  Only games I beat or games that I am currently playing are eligble for a Tau award and you can see the list of games I beat in 2021 over on Twitter and you can see my now playing list over on Discord

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257

Game of the Year

 

Obviously it's Shin Megami Tensei 5.  Once again mainline SMT delivers a top quality product and despite some bullshitty day 1 DLC, it's pretty much everything I could have hoped for.  I bought the Switch specifically for this game and before it's release, I was sort of regretting my purchase but this thing made it all worth it.  Do yourself a favor and go play it 

Best First Playthrough 2021

LISA may have come out in 2014 but I was extremely late to this one but I can't think of a game that I played this year that stuck with me quite as strongly as LISA did.  It's dark, its funny, its challenging, its got crows that are save points that explode when you use them, what more could you possibly want?  Also the soundtrack fucking SLAPS.  The game is like, 7 pounds on Steam so go buy it 

Biggest Liar

This game was a massive piece of shit with its uninteresting story and completely idiotic lead character but the worst offence this game pulls is telling you that repeated deaths will result in a deleted save game.  Well guess what? That's not true.  The dev team had to lie to you to create a sense of tension because the game is so poorly written and poorly made that it can't do it by itself.  Fuck this game

Biggest Dissapointment 

I was pretty interested in Everhood when I first saw it.  It's very clearly trying to do an Undertale but the rhythm game based combat looked like something that was right up my alley.  Playing it was also pretty promising at first too but it's trying so hard to be deep (like Undertale) and mysteries (like Yume Nikki et al) and instead just comes off as pretentious crap.  The soundtrack was good and there are some really strong moments but overall the game felt like a total slog.  If games that have their heads shoved so far up their own arse that they can use their own skulls as periscopes appeal to you, then maybe you'll like it, but I shall not be doing a repeat playthrough of this one in a hurry 

Pleasantest Surprise

So if you look through the Twitter thread you'll notice that this game isn't on there because I'm stupid and forgot to add it to the list when I beat it.  I guess that makes its title in this article also rather appropriate.

I got this game for free off the Epic Game Store and wasn't expecting a lot from it and granted, it's not really anything special.  It's a sort of generic hairy dad game with the hairy dad replaced with a teenage girl and the voice acting is a bit weird but it' rather pleasing visually and I found myself getting pretty attatched to the characters by the end.  Also the game climaxes with you having an all out rat war with the catholic church and that's pretty cool.  Not a masterpiece by any stretch but I was expecting a pile of stinky poop garbage and got something pretty playable that I kept wanting to go back to until I beat it and I'm genuinely happy its getting a sequel. 

Worst Game

I played through many a stinker.  Benbo Quest, Summer of 58, Slender the Arrival, The Tape and a bunch more but none of them were quite as putrid and as unplayable as Bendy and the Ink Machine.  An uninteresting, unscary, slow, boring and buggy mess of a game that did nothing but waste my time and piss me off to no end.  Don't buy this, dont play it even if you get it for free, it's an absolute disgrace to the horror genre and the people who put this out into the world should be ashamed of themselves for creating something so irredeemably vile

Well that's it, that's all I can be bothered to write about this late at night.  I'm now going to wrap up under my sheets and play GOTY Shin Megami Tensei 5 until I fall asleep.  

Happy New Year everyone!

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

 https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

The Epic Game Store

 

So today I didn't get much gaming done myself.  Mainly just a bit of progress in Shin Megami Tensei 5 in my lunch break and a bit of Persona 2: Innocent Sin on Stream so tonight I just want to take a moment to appriciate how cool the Epic Game Store is.

I'm sure there's a quite a few people who would turn their nose up at something like the Epic Game Store because if we're being brutally honest, it lacks a lot of the features that Steam does.  Hell, I don't even think it has game gifting as a feature which is INCREDIBLY stupid.  It caused a problem once when I had to deliver a grand prize for a game that was, at the time, exclusive to epic and I had made the incorrect assumption that gifting would have just been a thing but I guess Epic Games just assumes its entire userbase has no friends and therefore have not implemented it.  I got the game to the viewer in the end but I had to jump through some hoops to make it happen.

So despite it being barebones as all hell then why do I think its so cool? Well the answer is simple really, it's because they are constantly showering me with free shit.  At time of writing I have 58 games in my Epic Games library and the amount of money I've spent on any of that is ZERO.  Not a single penny since I downloaded the software and yet I have more games than I can shake a stick at.  It's not like they are shit games either; The Texorcist, Control, A Plague Tale, Sonic Mania, Remnant and Nioh are just a few of the standouts from the ever changing free game they just give away every so often

Even now, for Christmas, they are giving away 15 games for Christmas.  Every day I log in and BAM, another game in the library that will surely sit in the backlog for god knows how long.  I've heard its a bit shit but the first game they gave away in this set was goddamn Shenmue 3.  I didn't want to pay money for that but as someone who enjoyed the first two I sure as shit wanted to check it out, and now I can. 

They also seem to have some deal with Square Enix or something because as I was streaming I got an alert that says that Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Intergrade is now avaliable for purchase.  I've heard the FF7 Remake PC version is a steaming pile of dogshit but Intergrade was locked to the still unobtainable PS5 so just having it avaliable to me is nice, it might actually be the first thing I end up spending money on with the platform.  

Steam is still king and GoG Galaxy has way more features but it's hard not to have a soft spot in my heart for Epic when they just give me so much free shit so often.

Iron Tank

 

Last night I finished Iron Tank on stream so I wanna say a few things about it

When I first fired up Iron Tank I was expecting something more akin to Jackal but with a tank instead of a Jeep or whatever that game had.  While not completely off the mark it's a fair bit different in that Jackal is quite fast and arcade-like while Iron Tank is a bit more methodical in its approach.  That's not to say Iron Tank is a slow game by any stretch but careful progression into each encounter is very clearly the best route to success with this one.  

The premise for Iron Tank is simple, you are a tank and you start at the bottom of a long map and you're one and only objective is to get to the top of the map and blow up the big bad at the end 

 

While you trundle along the various paths you can get various power ups for your tank that involve a longer range shot, power powerful shots, exploding shots and rapid fire.  There's also a very rare "?" ability which wipes the entire screen of enemies and even some bosses and there's a reserve health bar that you never really get to use because this game is stingy as hell with HP.

Now I'm willing to cut the game a lot of slack given its age but the controls in this game are awful and until you get used to them they will be the prime reason for you eating one too many bullets and blowing up more often than not.  The standard stuff makes sense like moving with D Pad and shooting regular bullets with A and tank shells with B but things get real fucky when you have to start manipulating the direction of the turret.  To do that you have to hold down A and then move in the directon you want the turret to face.  The problem with this is that you cant move the turret by itself so you get into situations where an enemy is right up in your face and you end up taking collision damage because you ran into him when trying to turn the turret to shoot him.  This then has the knock on effect of the turret then being the wrong way so another enemy can come from the other direction and shove a shell right up your exhaust pipe, which is a little annoying to say the least.

But to be fair to Iron Tank, it's EXTREMELY forgiving with its checkpoints.  You get them constantly and each one even comes with a password so you can continue from that check exactly next time you play.  Even if you game over you get to start from that very same check point so considering how mosts games of this era are, Iron Tank is probably one of the most forgiving I've ever played. 

But this idea of fairness goes totally out of the window in the games final stage.  By itself, if you come prepared with items out the arse and you are ready to throw down, it isn't THAT hard.  But if you use your resources getting to that final boss and then dying on him, God have mercy on your soul because you aren't getting back without a fight.  The power up that makes your shot stronger and go through walls (F) is REQUIRED for that final area but there isn't any pick ups of it to refill.  So in my playthrough I made it to the end, pretty easily I might add when I was geared out, but then died to the final guy because if his hitbox comes even 1 pixel on top of you, you die instantly.  This then led to a good while of me trying and failing to even get to that final boss again because I only had a weak shot and the only powerups that the game was giving to me was rapid fire and some useless AOE thing.

What I COULD have done is used a password for an area or two back so I could make sure I had enough F for when I got to the boss but I was at wits end with this nonsense so I pulled out a game genie and gave myself infinite health.  I'm not proud of it really but even with the cheat the boss could STILL kill me with direct contact and that was about the only part of him that was a problem so I'm taking the win, sue me.

Despite my final area frustrations though, I had a lot of fun with Iron Tank and it has a pretty good set of achievements on Retro Achievements.org so I'm more than willing to git gud and give it another go.  It's hard to suggest because of its janky controls but if you feel like thats something you could get around then give Iron Tank a try, a solid 6/10 NES game

First Impressions of Mistover

 Technically I started this game yesterday but the only thing I did today was stream Iron Tank and SMT V so I'm taking a chance to talk about my first few dungeons in this game I got for free on PSN.

The first and most obvious thing about it is that the moment the game starts you realize that you're just playing Darkest Dungeon again.  The dungeons play out a bit more like a Mystery Dungeon type deal, sure but the overall vibe of the game just screams Darkest Dungeon clone.  I'm not really saying this as a bad thing either since I loved Darkest Dungeon and more of that with a twist is always a good thing.  The game is also anime as hell with a lot of the characters being moe blob anime girls with large lances and stuff like that.

It may look and feel like a Darkest Dungeon clone but it seems to have ripped its plot, however, right out of Demons Souls.  There's a big pillar of fog that's been wreaking havoc, adventureres go in the fog to try and stop it and those that go in don't usually come back out.  A bog standard reason to have an adventure but we're more here for party management and fighting with RNG more than anything else.

You have a town where you manage your team of anime people and kit them out with stuff as well as prepare for your travels into the mist.  There are all sorts of shops and upgrade places that all get thrown at you at once and right now it feels all a bit overwhelming.  It's not so much that the systems are hard to understand, so once you spend a little time with it, it all falls into place but the game just backs up a big dump truck of stuff at you and leaves you to work it out.  I'm almost sure this is intentional to make you feel like an out of place adventurer whos in over your head but from an actual game play perspective its just annoying to have to sit there and sift through all this shit before I can really get going.

Once you're ready, you grab a quest from the anime girl in town and head into a dungeon.  Dungeons are randomly generated affairs filled with monsters, obstacles, traps and loot.  Each of your characters has a unique skill to help traverse the place and while you're exploring you have to manage hunger and your light source.  I think if your characters fall while you're doing these dungeons they are gone for good but I've not lost anyone yet so I'm not entirely sure if the game has perma-death.

The most interesting feature though is the Doomsday Clock.  When you finish a dungeon, depending on how much of it you explored and how well you did finding chests and such, a big old clock will tick up towards midnight.  If you get everything in the dungeon then it doesn't move and if you leave with a bunch of shit undone then it progresses.  If it gets to midnight then the games over and you lose.  I've heard it can also tick backwards if you do REALLY well but I found everything there was to find in a small dungeon and it didn't happen so I guess I have to do the bigger levels for that. 

Either way, I think I'm going to have a good time with Mistover, only time will tell if the RNG makes me rip my hair out or not but for a game I got for free on PSN, so far I'm impressed

The Skill of Games Journalists

 

Games writing the last handful of years has got a bad wrap over the last few years.  Whether it be the shoe-horning in of identity politics in reviews, giving perfect reviews to good or average games, giving bad scores to niche titles they don't understand or weird "gamer bad" opinion pieces, a lot of people on the internet have a certain disdain for gaming news sites and their writers.  One thing that often comes in to question is "Do games journalists actually need to be good at games in order to review them?"

Well to put it simply, yes they do you flipping twit, how on Earth is that even a question?!  But let's go into it a bit more shall we?

The first question that you have to ask yourself is, what even is the purpose of a game review?  What game reviews are SUPPOSED to do is help you make an informed decision as a consumer on whether or not you think a game will be worth buying.  Obviously these can't be written without a little bit of the writers own opinion on the title being peppered in but, as a customer, you would hope that the person writing the review would know what they are talking about.

Well that's where the problem lies with game reviews on these major sites such as IGN and Kotaku.  The writers for these sites aren't just clueless about most of the games they play, they seem to be clueless about the entire medium in general.  The biggest example of that that sits at the forefront of peoples memories was the review of Cuphead.  The person who put that review together struggled SIGNIFICANTLY with the tutorial stage of the game.  Specifically on one of the first jump where the player is expected to perform a jump followed by a dash to reach a high up platform.  Cuphead is considered to be a fairly challenging game but this is something that a 4 year old perform in seconds and yet it ellued this guy for quite a while.  Another example would be The Independant slamming Astral Chain on Switch for "not giving grades after combat encounters".  The only problem is that the game DOES do that, but foregoes the feature if you're playing the game on the casual setting.  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with playing the game on casual but avid fans of that kind of game will want to know how the higher difficulty levels stack up and they will not be able to get that information from a review.

These writers are not fit for purpose.  I'm not saying that every games writer needs to be a top 5 speedrunner of a game in order to write a review on it but to be able to get a good idea of how the game is really like you need to AT LEAST be able to clear it on Normal.  Playing a game on easy may give the writer an idea of basic stuff like the control scheme or maybe they can put down some thoughts on the story, but because they often miss the real meat and potatoes of a games content it is IM-POSSIBLE for them to write a review that will successfully help a person make an informed purchase.

Let's imagine if we weren't talking about game reviews and instead we were talking about cars.  Let's imagine you aren't much of a gear-head and you have zero idea what kind of car you want to fit your needs.  To maybe educate yourself on the topic a little bit before heading to the dealership maybe you'll go online and check out some reviews of car models that you might think fits your needs.  You find a car review and it says stuff like "the car handles terribly and all the extra features make it confusing to operate".  Only here's the kicker, the guy writing the review can't drive, like at all, and doesn't know a steering wheel from a gear stick.  In fact, the guy writing the review for this car sucks SO BAD at driving, that when he took it for a test spin in order to write his piece, he crashed into a food bank for starving children and everyone in the village went hungry that day.  The confusing features he talked about? He was referring to thinks like the indicator and gear box.  If you found that out about the guy who wrote the piece, you'd be pissed off.  You NEED a good quality of information to make an informed decision on a purchase that big but instead you got a guy who can't drive and a 800 word article about how the back seats are sexist and the colour of the tyres are racist.  

Well that's the kind of enthusiast press we have have with gaming.  Not passionate users who care about making sure you spend your hard earned money on the best games for you but shitters who don't know a face button from a d-pad telling you the bare minimum in the shortest possible time frame in order to farm you for traffic clicks to their shitty websites.

So here's my proposition for how a review SHOULD be conducted

1) Make sure the person doing the review is at least somewhat versed in the genre of the game they are reviewing.  If you have a guy that loves JRPGs but hates fighting games, then for the love of God don't have him review Guilty Gear Strive, his opinion on that particular topic isn't worth shit

2) At least TWO playthroughs of the game in question, preferably the second being on an elevated difficulty or a New Game +.  If you really want to inform people about the easy mode have another writer whos less well versed in whatever genre give it a go for a little bit and just include it as some quick extra thoughts at the end

3) No rushing.  Stop trying to get reviews out either for or just before release day.  Some people "wait for the reviews" before buying, so how about making sure their wait is actually worth it?  If they really care about the game they'll buy it anyway and if they are on the fence an extra few days to make sure they get the information they need wont bloody kill them.

4) Keep your opinion as far away as possible.  Not 100% possible I know but if you think giant anime titties in whatever RPG you're reviewing are "sexist" then save that for a different article.  In the main review you can just include it as something like "a stylised look that might not sit right with everyone", for example. That's really what I mean by this

and I think that's all I'm really asking for.  Modertely skilled players giving me a basic rundown of what a game is like so that I can get a vague idea of if I want to drop 6-8000 yen on it.  It REALLY isn't  that hard, if YouTube boi with 500 subs and a mic from 10 years ago can do it then a salaried "professional" games writer can do it too

Build Woes and Rockman

 

A Monday in the office means a MegaTen-Mega-Day with Shin Megami Tensei 5 in my lunch break followed by Persona 2: Innocent Sin in the evening on stream.  

Persona 2 I'm having fun with but today's session was fairly uneventful.  Summoned some demons, beat up a high schooler with my brain monsters, grinded some levels, you know, the usual stuff.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 however I'm starting to have some serious concerns over.  

Usually when I play these games I go for Strength builds on the main character.  Even in Shin Megami Tensei 4 where magic is OP as all hell, I went for a strength build on my first playthrough.  So when I started SMT 5 I decided to try and mix things up a bit for myself and try out a magic build, pumping almost all my level up points into magic, vitality and agility and letting strength fall to the wayside.  I've not been having a massive amount of trouble with the game so far but I've seen some things on line that have me slightly worried.  There's a group I follow that talks about the Megami Tensei games and a few members of that group have been posting their builds that they used to kill the DLC boss Demifiend.  All but one of them have been strength builds with only 1 guy doing it on magic and talking about how difficult it was.  

I don't mind a challenge, I'm not about to start investing in strength or restart the game to get the build right, I'm locked in now.  However I can't help but feel slightly worried that I've made a whole bunch of the late game challenges a whole bunch harder for myself than they needed to be by trying to get cute with my stat allocations.  At the very least, if I have made it harder for myself it will be so much more satisfying once I eventually pull it off. 

Another thing I've been doing in recent days is trying to get better at speedrunning Megaman 1 for the NES.  Out of all the Megaman games games in the classic series the first one I feel is one of the hardest.  It's got less robot masters than the other games, sure, but it just feels sort of janky and I never really could get fully behind pre-dash (slide) Megaman.  Still though, I'm having a blast running this game.  I managed to learn a few zips that make some of the stages easier but my overall lack of practice is really holding back my time.  The game isn't very long, with my runs now consistantly sitting under the 30 minute mark but one mistake is EXTREMELY costly and it can feel very frustrating when it goes wrong.  Today, for example, I died one time to Elec Man and ended up losing about 30 seconds.  Despite most of my other splits being green or gold I couldn't quite make the time back and ended 17 seconds over my personal best.  In other games I've run obviously mistakes put you in the red but I always feel like there's some area where I can pull the time back or at least be close to a PB by the end, in Megaman 1 however, a single mistake may as well be a reset.  The only reason I don't reset is because I have to practice all the other stages and I'd probably be stuck in the first 3 robot masters if I tried to be that strict with it. 

Still though, I'm pretty motivated to keep practicing and bring that time down.  I'm pretty certain I'm not quite good enough to come close to a world record but if I could get, maybe a top 50-ish time on the leaderboard I'd be pretty happy I think.

How about finish your stupid game?

 

I know I was supposed to be using the blog for a sort of diary type thing nowadays but today I have to spend some time going off on one.

If you do care about what I've been playing today and yesterdays its just making the usual rounds with SMT V mainly; grinding, recruiting, dying, you know, all the good stuff.  I also streamed a whole bunch of Yakuza where the combat in that games just swings wildly between insultingly easy and actually impossible.  There's one guy in particular in the collesium who is just consistantly clapping my cheeks and I just cannot seem to get the better of him.  He's not THAT hard but getting hit like, once, means that a quarter of my health vanishes and unlike fights in the story, I can't spam convini energy drinks.

But what I want to go off about today is a game called Ghostrunner.  I bought Ghostrunner after seeing the trailer because it looked like someone took Mirrors Edge and Hotline Miami and then smashed them together.  The atmosphere of the game and the soundtrack are right up my alley so I snapped it up right away.  At first I was having a good time with it but the more I play it the more janky and buggy it seems to get and it all came to a head yesterday with a certain platforming challenge.  

In one level of the game you have to run through these giant spinning discs that have breaks in them.  At first they are spinning too fast so as you approach them you have to right click them to slow down time on them which allows you to either pass through them or run along them.  Now one thing you have to understand about Ghostrunner is that it's not an easy game.  It presents you with pretty rough challenges that you will probably die on a few times but will also give you pretty frequent checkpoints so you can try over and over nice and quickly until you get it.  

I came to one spinning disc section about half way through the stage where the disc was horizontal and was positioned near a wall.  The idea is that you time slow the disc and run along top of it, jump off and wall run along the wall to the next platform.  I will attempt to crudely draw a diagram of the scene in MSPaint

The black thing is the disc and the red thing is the wall, looking at the part of the level sideways on.  So I slow the disc, jump on the wall and screw up my jump to the ledge and die, no problem I'll just start again.  Only problem, when I hit the restart button the scene had changed.

The disc had like, pivoted and was now clipping through the wall as it spun around.  I tried to press on anyway only to find that the angle of the disc and the spinning meant that it would make the wall run impossible or, if I could get on the wall, I'd get clipped by the edge of the disc and knocked off to my death.  Completion of the room was impossible and my only solution was to quit the game.

Now while each level has a great number of checkpoints that make dying not a problem, the game DOES NOT save progress at those checkpoints.  So I had to do the entire fucking level over and then hope to God that it doesn't happen again.  Well it DID actually happen again, 2 more times on 2 different discs in the stage only I got lucky the other 2 times and the disc pivot was either not a problem or a minor annoyance at best.  

This has really soured my view of the game now.  When I fire up Ghostrunner now I'm constantly worried about what game-breaking bullshit is going to pop up out of nowhere and force me to restart enitre stages thus wasting god knows how much of my life with this crap.  I went onto the Steam discussion page to see if anyone else had experienced it and while I couldn't find anything about it, I was greeted to thread upon thread of people complaining about other, way more serious bugs and glitches.  

I know game-dev is no easy task and obviously its not really realistic to expect a developer or studio to find and fix every bug before release but this is game breaking shit.  Ghostrunner is 25 pounds and apparently developed in part by 3D fucking Realms of all people so having level geometry just randomly break or game crashes or major performance hiccups just is not acceptable.  

How about finish your fucking game and make sure it works before you charge me money for it, eh? Is that really so much to ask?

MegaTen Mega Day

 

Today has been a day for Megami Tensei games and that means I had a very good day indeed.

In my work lunch break I broke out the Switch in order to play some Shin Megami Tensei 5 which basically involved me spending the entire hour getting my ass handed to me.  I've come across a side quest that I got from a Lilim who said that she would join me in exchange for going and murdering a Principality.  If you present me with a choice of cute girl in booty shorts or Statue of Liberty lookin-ass angel thing, I know where my loyalty lies.  So off I go, about to spit in the face of God once more, as is customary in these games where I come to the grim realization that I don't actually have a demon that knows Mudo.  This, I thought, would be fine because I'm still doing pretty good damage and despite the damage buff they get from the hard mode they aren't one shotting me or anything.  The problem with this fight however is that there's two of these fuckers and they keep healing each other.  Their heal gets them to full and eventually I just run out of steam before I can take them down.  This of course means that I made exactly 0 progress in my play session today as I went around gathering money from vending machines so that I can go and re-summon or maybe fuse a few things with Mudo.  I wasn't able to beat them this afternoon but I think I'm in a good position to win in my next session.

Afer that I came home from the office, fired up the stream and started playing Persona 2 Innocent Sin.  I'm playing a fan-translation of the original PS1 version because it has a set on Retro Achievements and I'm an absolute whore for that website 

https://retroachievements.org/game/11355

Given that modern Persona sort of bears a fair bit of similarity to mainline in demon gathering and fusion it's definately a change of pace to play a game like Persona 2.  Persona 2 still has a negotiation mechanic but a successful demon chat will result in them giving you a stack of cards of whatever type they are.  You then take these cards to the velvet room and summon them so the whole fusion thing is sort of out of the window and instead you just pay for demons.  Between that, the automated combat that you have to manage to make sure you're ranking things up and fusion spells (powerful magics that also have a chance to randomly raise your stats) there's an awful lot to take in at the start.  I spent my time strolling down easy street beating up on demons for level ups and not progressing the plot much but I have another session penned in for the first hour of tomorrows stream so maybe we can at least get to the first boss within that time. Looking forward to playing both this game and it's follow up, Eternal Punishment!

Massive Rat War

 Well my Sunday was filled with mainly not game related stuff but the one thing I did manage to do was finish A Plague Tale: Innocence.  Like I said in the previous post, it's not a bad game but it doesn't have enough good ideas to support its length.  There was about 16 chapters total with the first 6 and the last 2 being sort of cool and then everything in between feeling like a bunch of stupid padding.  They could have very easily cut the game down to about 10 chapters and it would have been a perfect length but instead it really does start to feel like a slog by the end.  

 Spoilers ahead if you care for some reason

One thing I did find quite interesting though is that in the last few moments of the game you get to actually control the rats and you have to sic them on dudes like little diseased Pikmin.  You spend maybe 2 chapters of the game using this power to get through some guards only for the entire thing to climax in what I can only describe as a rat war with a priest.  I was sort of worried that the game would do that really annoying thing of just having you fight goons while a cutscene happens in the background and you just win when enough of them are dead but there's a full on hilarious boss battle with giant rat towers and it was actually quite the spectacle.  I'm glad that I stuck with it to the end but I'm also glad that I didn't have to pay for it. 6/10 I guess.

Before I wrote this article I actually loaded up a game called Ghost Runner, a sort of Hotline Miami via Mirrors Edge that's kind of fun.  I got half way through a stage though when a spinning platform bugged out when I landed on it and angled itself at about 45 degrees.  When I respawned I could still land on the platform but it was clipping through the wall I was supposed to run along and when I tried to do the wall run I'd get knocked off and fall to my death.  I tried to exit the game and reload my save thinking I could go from the checkpoint but when the game loaded in I was at the start of the stage and upon seeing that I promptly quit the game and it might be a good few days before I drum up the will to play it again.  

Tomorrow I'm hoping will be a bit of a MegaTen day.  I'm working in the office which means I'll be lugging my Switch down with me to play some SMT V in my lunch break and when I get home I'll be firing up the PS1 version of Persona 2 (Innocent Sin) for the Stream!  I'll be back tomorrow to report how many times I got my ass kicked by demons

The Worst Controls on the Playstation

 

Was too sleepy at the end of the stream last night to fire up Blogger and write a post so instead I'll do it now, just after I wake up 

I've been making slow progress on Shin Megami Tensei 5, of course.  I've seemed to have hit a bit of a difficulty spike in the area that I'm in.  Previously every encounter was a walk down easy street and then I hit this next big area and suddenly encounters aren't so much difficult as much as they have the potential to go completely go tits up in a single enemy turn.  One bad critical or one miss and my life flashes before my eyees, especially in a game where the death of the main character means a game over even if all your other demons are just fine.  Nothing however, that a bit of demon management and maybe a little grinding for a level or two can't solve though.

I'm also coming up on the end of A Plague Tale which is a game that's FAR overstaying its welcome.  It's not a bad game by any stretch, a fairly generic hairy dad game where the hairy dad has been replaced with a teenage girl and her child brother but it just doesn't have enough ideas to support it's length.  I'm on chapter 15, hopefully the last one, but it feels like should have ended 5 chapters ago.  There's only so much you can do with "sneak around dudes" and "avoid rats" and you can see the game struggling at around chapter 6 to keep things interesting.  I don't hate this game but I'm sure as hell glad that Epic Game Store gave it to me for free, I might have been a bit less charitable with it if I had actually paid money.

Finally I spent my time on stream playing Megaman Legends on the PS1 which is I'm fairly certain the only series of Megaman games I've not played before unless there's some obscure Megaman Kart on something like the Wonderswan or some shit.  The game is actually pretty fun despite feeling a bit clunky at first but once you get a handle on it all it feels just fine.  Also the way the characters act and that specific brand of 90s anime voice acting makes me feel like I'm playing some kind of Saturday morning cartoon, it's the kind of game that a younger me would have REALLY loved.  One thing I cannot forgive though is the movement controls.  Holy Mary Mother of God these are maybe THE WORST movement controls I've seen in a game maybe ever.  People give classic Survival Horror tank controls shit for being "clunky and hard" but Megaman Legends makes Resident Evil feel like the smoothest thing in the world.  You move forward and back with up and down, as usual, but then you rotate Megaman with L1 and R1 and left and right are this weird strafe thing that isn't good for anything since the camera is too close and you can't see where you're going when strafing.  You can reverse these, which I did, but it still feels weird.  On top of that, the lock-on feature is the most fussy piece of garbage I've ever seen in a game.  If you are locked on to one enemy and another enemy comes even remotely near you, the lock on will start swinging back and forth between the two targets thus making killing either of them next to impossible.  Luckily shots sort of home onto enemies if you fire near them so locking on isn't actually required most of the time but it's still annoying when flying enemies decide to turn up.

With that Mega-man-mega-bitching out of the way I'm now off to try and finish A Plague Tale so that maybe I can spend my evening complaining about it on here. 

Valkyrie の Jank

 I know I said not too long ago I would be trying to use the blog for daily posts about my gaming activities but I shortly found myself in a bit of a busy situation and so things fell to the wayside for a while.  I'm still mad busy but I figured at least attempting to write something short for the day is better than nothing at all. 

Today has been a sort of uneventful day for gaming.  A day in the office meant that my time to game while managing this other thing meant that I wasn't really able to do anything until I got on stream.  When I did get on stream though I kicked things off with a bit of Megaman 1, a game I'm attempting to learn to speedrun.  The world recording is an absolutely insane 18 minutes-ish and while I'm struggling to stay under 30 minutes progress with the PB is coming nice and gradually.  There's a TON of very precise tricks in that game to skip massive portions of levels and I can pull of about 2 of them with any kind of reliability, 1 I can get sometimes and the rest I can't do yet at all.  If I want to get serious about cutting that time down learning those skips will be super important.

The main focus of today's gaming though was Legend of the Valkyrie on the NES as part of my 100 game challenge on stream.  It's a fun little game, I described it in my first session as it playing similar to Hydlide but if someone who was actually competant had made it.  Well I say competant but it's got a fair amount of bullshit involved with enemies spawning in at random and flinging fireballs that do a large chunk of your HP.  A problem that's circumvented by wandering around and grinding exp, sure, but it takes so long to get a single level that doing laps of the in starts to become a chore after a while though.

The most annoying thing about this game though is the password system.  Like a lot of games of it's time, when you want to stop and take a break, you have to generate a password.  It's not a huge password like in something like Megami Tensei but it's long enough and the entry screen annoying enough to be a bit of a pain in the ass.  You would think, with a password of that length, it would store everything in your current game but it doesn't.  When you put in the password you start with your current gold and exp intact but your inventory is completely wiped and you start on the first island.  That means that every time you play, you have to walk all the way around the mountains, kill a worm thing and get the boat, then ride the boat all the way to where you were before.  There are teleporters that I've not used yet that may solve at least some of this issue but I've been told that beating the game without the boat is impossible so at the very least you have to do that task every session.  When I played Metal Gear and put in that password that game was able to keep track of all my stuff and even exact location on the map but Valkyrie feels the need to rob all my shit as punishment for turning the game off, what a time vampire.

Anyway, at least the game is kind of fun to play and hopefully I can just sweep though the whole thing in a single session next week.  If you've got a long Sunday afternoon to kill and you wanna try a weird NES game then maybe give it a try, there isn't much text and there's a guide online so it being Japan only isn't really a problem.

Hopefully I'll have more time tomorrow for a bit of SMT V but for now I'm going to bed

Snakes and Organized Crime

 Well I was in the office today so unfortunately the first "game diary" style post I'm putting up, I don't actually have all that much to say.  

In the time I had during my lunch break I, of course, played as much Shin Megami Tensei 5 as I could squeeze in.  I'm currently really enjoying this game and one thing I'm really happy about is my decision to put it on hard mode.  I remember back in my younger days, when I first got my hands on Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne (Or Lucifers Call as it was called for me) and my unfamiliarity with the series meant that I found the whole thing quite challenging.  Every boss fight was a struggle, a hard earned win that felt good when I figured out a good team of demons or a good strategy.  As I got older and played more MegaTen I eventually "got gud" so when I eventually got my hands on Shin Megami Tensei 4 I breezed through that entire game no problem and with that games hard mode being locked behind a full game clear, I haven't yet got around to doing it.  

Shin Megami Tensei 5 on hard, however, has BIG Nocturne energy that I'm really enjoying.  Just as I was getting comfortable running around the map and making short work of enemies, I enter a building and was treated to a boss fight.  I'm not going to spoil what the boss is or anything like that but it involves snakes but not by Tokyo Tower.  This boss stomped my shit effortlessly because my setup was AWFUL for it and unfortunately my lunch break ended before I could get another try.  However I've got some demons in stock that can help, I changed up my resistances so I'm not just granting it free turns and I'm ready to run right back in there and beat it's ass.  Excitement.

The other game I manged to get a fairly long session on today was Yakuza Kiwami, a game I'm playing on stream as part of my Yak-Attack series playthrough.  Most streams I do of that game devolve into me just doing mini-games for completion points but today I actually managed to progress the plot a little and I really like the plot of Kiwami so it's always a treat to see more of those cinematics.  On top of that I beat all the batting challenges which is a feat I'm particularly proud of since when I started the game I could barely even hit the ball AND I won a game of Shogi, a feat I thought was actually impossible.  I didn't get the completion point since you have to win a match without using the take-back function for that but the game can go fuck itself, I'm just happy I got a win at all.

I wanted to sign off each of these posts with a short "wot I plan to play tomorrow" bit but for the forseeable future every day is pretty much going to be playing just as much SMT5 as possible.  I actually think I'm near the end of my first playthrough for A Plague Tale: Innocence so maybe I'll put some time into that and try and see the ending but demon-busting takes main priority. 

Plans For Identity Gaming 2022

 

It's mid-November at time of writing I've come to the grim realisation that I've barely posted anything here or on YouTube for MONTHS.  Here I've been posting once ever so often but YouTube has been particularly barren of content for maybe over a year.  So the purpose of this post is to layout a plan for the 3 main platforms that I use for this charity page and maybe then I'll stop procrastinating and not let things like this or the YouTube channel fall to the wayside.

The Blog

It's been sort of hard to give a shit about updating the blog over the last year or so.  My main method of content production for the charity effort has been through the Twitch stream and on there I'll discuss things that I'd usually write here but live and with a chat.  I don't need to write a piece about my thoughts on a game I've been playing here because while I'm chilling with chat I can just talk about it there and hear other peoples opinions on it in real time, which is much cooler.

But the blog is where this whole thing started so I don't just want to let it die, so starting from either this evening (I'm writing this around noon) or tomorrow evening I'm going to start using the blog space as a sort of "Game diary".  Just a place I come to every evening before bed to write out what I've been gaming on that day and how I felt about it or some quick thoughts about some piece of news I found or whatever.  A pure stream of conscienceness with no real rhyme or reason, just to give people a little insight into what I've been doing and what kind of game-related thoughts are flying around my dumb brain.

The YouTube Channel 

This is the one facet of Identity Gaming that's basically been dead for a long-ass time.  I used to upload off the cuff lets plays and I experimented with some kind of unscripted ramblings about various topics to not a lot of success.  I'm not usually one to care about subscriber counts and video view counts and I was happy to upload that kind of content to an minescule viewership just because it was fun to turn on my mic and ramble randomly about something while I played odd games that interested me.  Back then though, the YouTube channel was making a small amount of money.  I forget what the network was called but I was getting about $20-$40 a month which I would then funnel into the charity.  My low effort content was generating cash for the Alzheimer's Society and that felt good.

Then YouTube changed the rules to me needing 1000 subs, I lost monetization and, since the point of Identity Gaming is to raise money for a charity I let the YouTube side of things die almost completely, acting more of a sort of repository for when I did something cool on stream like a speedrun PB or my Cuphead 200% deathless run. 

But that's sort of defeatist isn't it?  I'm ignoring an entire avenue of potential charity raising just because I'm too lazy to put some effort into a video.  Well then I got to thinking, I hate the state of modern game reviews and I'm a big fan of YouTube made analytical content, so why don't I do that?  The YouTube channel going forward will be used for long form video essay type shit about games wot I love or games wot I hate.  I've already started working on recording and scripting for the first one and for the first time in a while I'm actually having fun producing for YouTube again.  Even if it gets 1 view, 1 like and my channel doesn't grow at all off the effort, it's better to at least try than to just let the channel die.

Twitch

I don't even need to say anything about Twitch really, do I?  Nothing is really going to change here.  More streams, more donation incentives, more prizes being added to the list via the streak system we have going.  Hopefully I can find a little bit more time to work on emotes, overlays and all sorts of other stuff to make the viewing experience overall better for you guys but generally speaking it's business as usual here.

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There's some other minor things like Twitter where I'm planning to stop doom-scrolling through bad takes written by IGN journos and being toxic and instead I can just fill my timeline with me just enjoying things that I'm playing or finding cool indie projects that I think are worth keeping and eye on.  There's also instagram which is about as equally dead as the YouTube at time of writing so maybe I can put more effort into posting some cool game stuff I find on my travels while drowning the image in hashtags.

I'm hoping we can meet some BIG goals next year both for the content and for the charity and I cannot thank you all enough for your continued support up to this point.

Gargoyle's Quest 2

 

As I've been working my way through my 100 game NES challenge on stream, I've started to lose a little faith in the system overall.  It's a system held in such high regard by most people in retro game circles but the thing is absolutely teeming with really awful, trash games that are borderline unplayable.  But then Gargoyle Quest 2 came along and reminded me just how good games on this system can really be.

You play as Firebrand and you are tasked with going through the Ghoul Realm to stop something called the black light.  A simple plot for a simple game but we aren't really here for a detailed narrative experience now are we? We're here for that sweet platforming gameplay.  

The game is split into two sections, top down overworld exploration and side scrolling platforming.  In the overworld sections you walk around a big map, find towns, talk to demons, get items etc. and then when you reach a place of importance the game switches into the side scrolling mode.  When you're platforming you have a standard shot attack to kill enemies and you have a wing meter that lets you hover for a limited time after a jump.  The hover mechanic takes a little bit of getting used to at first but when you get good at it it becomes really satisfying.  As you play through the game you get upgrades that allow you to jump higher, shoot stronger, make platforms and float longer and as you aquire the game throws obstacles at you in just the right intensity to allow you to get used to your new abilities before tasking you with some pretty challenging stuff near the end. 

Now you might recognise Firebrand from a different game, Ghosts and Goblins, also on the NES and as most people know it's a LEGENDARILY difficult game that requires not only precise platforming and some really annoying enemies, but also two consecutive clears to get the proper ending.  This may lead you to believe that Gargoyle's Quest 2 is equally hard but have no fear because you'd be quite wrong.  With the exception of maybe the final two stages, most of the levels in this game are an absolute breeze and even then the last two levels are nothing compared to what the rest of the main series has to offer.  The hover makes a lot of the platfoming extremely lenient and even if you do find yourself struggling, you can farm "vials" in levels and on the world map to buy extra lives very quickly.  The bosses in each stage are also an absolute joke most of them dying in a small number of hits and with patterns that are extremely easy to figure out.  Even the last guy, with his one hit death orbs is an absolute joke when you realize that, by that point, you have infinite hover and anything dangerous he throws at you can be countered by just shooting it.  That said it's not a complete walk in the park but you probably will never end up in a position where you have to repeat a stage ad nausium because some bullshit enemy keeps killing you like in GnG.

It seems that this game is pretty well known and pretty well regarded and I can't believe it took me so long to dicover it for myself.  If you've not played it and you're looking to kill an afternoon with an NES game, then this is a pretty good one to fire up.  Also if you really like it and wan't more, Gargole Quest 1 is avaliable on Game Boy and a sequel to this game called Demon's Crest on the SNES is also waiting for you.  I've not played either of those but I enjoyed this one so much I'm about to go give them a try

Bendy and the Ink Machine

 

With horror being easily one of my favorite genres of game, I'm always on the lookout for good horror games to sink my teeth into and with all the rave reviews I saw about Bendy and the Ink Machine, I expected this to be pretty good.  To my dismay, however, it's a collosal piece of garbage.

The game follows some dude whos name I can't remember as he goes back to an old animation studio he used to work for only to find the place in complete disrepair.  He throws a switch, turns on an ink machine and everything goes to shit as he gets stalked and chased by all manner of horrors from the studios past.

The game is your standard modern horror fare where you walk around solving some basic puzzles, finding notes and audio logs and hiding from the enemies.  The big problem with the game play in Bendy is that there is no depth to ANY of it and after about the 2 hour mark the whole thing becomes extremely dull.  The puzzles are extremely simple and usually just involve wandering around an area in order to find an item or push a button.  When it does try something more complex than that it's laughably easy, like one section where you have to fill pressure valves or something but you just hold the E key until the little water level touches the line, the kind of puzzle your children might enjoy when waiting in the dentists office.  The combat is super simple where you just walk up to things and left click until the cease to be.  There are some boss fights that try to give some variety to the combat but they are just a case of slowly strafe around enemy until they become hittable.  The stealth also only comes in two flavors of run away or throw a can for a distraction and the sections are always very short and very easy.  The complete lack of challenge or creativity found in this game means that playing it through to the end feels like an absolute chore.

But boring, cliche and unscary horror games are dime-a-dozen on Steam.  If I was to get mad about every game like that I'd be raging longer than the expected life of the universe, but what really sets Bendy apart is that it also just doesn't fucking work.  The game is EXTREMELY buggy with things constantly not working right.  The one that really sticks out in my mind is where the game completely halted my progression because it wanted me to take an elevator.  What is supposed to happen is there's a cutscene where some woman talks to you, the elevator comes down and then you get it to go to the next bit of the game.  In my game, the elevator was already there and if I pushed the elevator button nothing happened.  I even went to every floor in the level and pushed the call button there too to see if that would fix it but nope, I was just stuck.  I had to quit the game, reload, listen to the cutscene again and THEN it worked.

But that's a minor annoyance compared to the fact that the games save system just doesn't fucking work.  If you aren't planning on finishing Bendy in a single session then don't bother.  I had an issue where I was losing a couple of hours of progress at a time because something would screw up with the auto saving system and then when I loaded my game it would just set me back a whole bunch.  I noticed it was possible to tell when the bug kicked in because the save icon would stay perpetually in the corner but it happened A LOT and I was constantly quitting and reloading in order to not potentially lose an hour or two of progress to a shoddily put together game.

Bendy and the Ink Machine is an embarassing example of game design, an embarassing example of horror and an embarassing example of coding ability.  A bad game is one thing, a bad game that doesn't work and wastes the players time is another.  Do not buy it, you can have the same experience with any free to play Unity build student project for free somewhere else

Difficulty Options are Bullshit

The topic of difficulty options have, for some reason, become a hot topic of debate on social media.  I feel that every couple of weeks or so a series of threads turns up on something like Twitter either complaining about games not having difficulty options or people complaining that a game included some kind of "auto-win" mode or something like that and people of course losing their minds and throwing insults at each other.  So I got thinking about it and I have come to the conclusion that in most cases difficulty options are complete dogshit.

As a concept they make sense, skilled players pick hard and new players pick easy, and there are a variety of games where they have been used effectively but in a staggeringly large number of cases, the difficulty settings are just frustrating bullshit that's lazily mismanaged by whatever developers are making the game.  So for the next few paragraphs in this post I will outline just a few of the ways in which having an option AT ALL is a pile of garbage.

1) The Pump and Dump

This is probably the most common thing you'll come across in games, where a playthrough on easy and a playthrough on hard is identical in every way except the numbers on damage done and damage taken are just raised and lowered depending on what mode you're on.  The worst example I can think of this off the top of my head is basically any game made by modern day Naughty Dog.  If you play Uncharted on easy or normal, Nathan Drake can walk right into direct fire of a mounted machine gun, take all of those bullets to the face and the only thing that happens is the screen gets a bit grey and you have to suck your thumb behind a rock for a bit to heal up.  If you then play that game on Crushing Nathan turns into a man made of wet toilet paper and will go rag-dolling off into space if an enemy so much as coughs on him.  Everything else about the game is the same, the only thing your mode choice dictates is how much hiding behind walls you have to do.  This is especially boring if you're the kind of person who likes to play normal first and then hard because unless the game really gripped you, playing the exact same game again in the exact same way again but slower just isn't fun.  

2) Built for Upgrades

I feel like I never noticed this being a problem until semi recently but another way difficulty is mis-managed is linking it directly to the games upgrade system and new game + playthroughs.  The game that really hit home just how bad this gets is Dante's Inferno on PS3.  In that game you can pick at the start if you want to play on easy, normal or hard but if you pick hard mode from a new game file then you are going to have a hell of a hard time (lol).  But, if you play through the game once, get a bunch of upgrades and soul points, beat the game and then carry that shit over into a hard mode run, the challenge becomes a lot more manageable.  This is bullshit because when you die it starts to feel like it's not your fault.  Like imagine someone comes up to you and says "hey solve this jigsaw puzzle" but then the set of pieces they give you is just missing a bunch of pieces.  That wouldn't be fun, right? and that's exactly what it feels like to play a game on hard mode when it's been built around an upgrade system.

3) Locked

This is a real pet peeve of mine as someone who likes to play games on a harder mode most of the time but locking a hard mode behind a full game clear is an UNFORGIVEABLE practice and any developer that has done this deserves to stub their toe on the leg of a metal coffee table.  One thing people love to complain about when they talk about difficulty is that "they don't have time to learn the game and get good", which personally I think is a dogshit argument but OK I'll roll with it.  But by that same logic, I'm also a busy man with a large backlog of games and I do not have all the time in the world to play through a game twice just to get the experience that I mainly enjoy.  I can understand locking challenge modes behind a clear like Dante Must Die in Devil May Cry but when I buy a game, load it up and my options for difficulty are "easy, normal and LOCKED" I want to start swinging at people

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This is just 3 ways that I pulled off the top of my head and I'm sure if you gave me a stack of games and a couple of days I could probably come up with a lot more.  But what is the solution?  Well, it's to probably get rid of difficulty settings altogether.  A game that springs right to the forefront of my mind in this regard is Celeste.  The base game where you get the story of the girl going up the mountain is a challenging yet fair experience that I think anyone can clear with a little bit of practice.  When you finish the game, you can either fuck off and never play it again OR you can go and hunt down the B-Sides, C-Sides, Golden Berries etc. which are all challenging extras that players who want to push themselves with absolutely enjoy.  The game is designed in such a way so that EVERYONE can get a win but those who want to master the mechanics and platforming can get even more satisfaction after the credits roll

Another example of this would be a game like Bastion.  When you start Bastion up you aren't given any difficulty settings but a short ways into the game you unlock the shrine.  In the shrine you can unlock little statues that you activate and for each active statue you get an experience and currency bonus in return for the game becoming harder.  This allows players to customize their own experience to make the game as hard or as easy and they would like and players who do go for the extra challenge are appropriately rewarded.  If you don't like a hard game and just want the story, leave the shrine alone, but if you want to show just how good you are at Bastion then head into that shrine and activate EVERYTHING and see how hard the game gets.  The annoying thing about this example in particular is the time it takes to get the shrine and the statues but my point is that instead of having an "easy, normal, hard" mode setting, let players tweak certain aspects of the game themselves to get the challenge that they would like.

Obviously difficulty settings aren't just going to dissapear and like I said, they CAN be used well in certain cases but the point is that most devs are very lazy with them and in a lot of cases just letting the creators deliver the experience THEY want to give you is probably the better option.  Game too hard and has no modes? Just play something else.  Game has an easy mode that's far too easy for you? Just don't use it.  More importantly, shut the fuck up about it on Twitter

Super Benbo Quest Turbo Deluxe

 

Every so often a game (or a film etc.) comes along that falls into the category of "so bad it's good".  An example of these in gaming would be something like Deadly Premonition (although I just think it's good, but whatever) and in film, The Room.  These are the kind of games that people know kind of suck for a plethroa of reasons and yet playing/watching them brings the person great joy.  So people see how favorably these films and games are spoken about and then they try to make something similar but attempts at this kind of film and game making almost always fall flat

Which is what Super Benbo Quest Turbo Deluxe is.  Someone trying to make a game that's "so bad that it's awesome" except it fails at the entire second half of that phrase and ends up just being bad.  The game is about a little blue girl fighting an army of skeletons and she does this by running, jumping and punching her way through 7 or 8 stages.  The dialogue is full of needless cursing and very obviously done on purpose spelling mistakes to try and be all eDgY and while it's going for humor the only thing it achieves is eye rolls.

The gameplay, while not awful is generally not very good and is sort of a chore to play.  Benbo, which I assume is the girls name, is somehow both too floaty while also feeling extremely stiff which makes platforming and absolute pain in the ass.  It's fine in early stages but the last few levels actually require some precision and it's hard to achieve that level of precision when you feel like a cinderblock on an ice rink.  Occasionally you'll have to punch an enemy or two and most enemies die in one hit but the real shittiness comes out in the bossfights which all boil down to running up to the enemy and mashing the attack button until you win.  Sometimes you might die, sometimes the boss will die in the blink of an eye, just keep restarting until the game lets you through.  I think the best way to describe the way Super Benbo Quest plays is just painfully boring.

I thought at first it was trying to emulate the kind of humor you'd find in the early days of sites like Newgrounds but that's sort of an insult to those creators.  Sure, there was plenty of edgy stuff on Newgrounds back in the day but it wasn't edgy just for the sake of being edgy in most cases, there was some sense in a lot of those old animations that the person making it did at least care a little bit about the project they were working on.  Super Benbo Quest feels like it had no effort put into it because it's purposefully trying to go for the "so bad it's good" appeal so anything shitty is just going to be part of the games "charm"

Here's the thing, if you strive to make something good and it turns out shit, people may still fall in love with it because they recognise the vision, the hard work and the passion behind the project.  When you strive to make something shit, the only thing it can possibly be is shit and boy howdy is Super Benbo a pile of shit.

Don't play it